Higher.

Anguish is the bearer of news that something is amiss. We shoot the messenger on this one. We blame the feeling as the problem because it was the one sent to deliver the message. Being uncomfortable reminds us of what comfort is like. Anguish is the feeling that we are off the mark, we are in a tumultuous relationship against ourselves with nobody winning the battle. The discontent where we wish for peace, relaxation, where we believe lies all we want. The only reason we even look to what we had before was because we are missing it now. Now a shovel to the ground where the hole’s dirt no longer resides. The ground doesn’t even notice the dirt is there, but the hole is now apparent. 

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why must we miss something to appreciate what we once had and not until then? Why am I thankful for my legs only when I am reminded that there are people who served for this country who cannot use theirs. Does pain even exist, or is it the absence of contentment? Are we at baseline, like the ground with the dirt, only to get something removed where we talk about pain, discomfort like it was added? Am I feeling OK now, or am I in such constant emotional pain that pain is my new norm? If someone else had to live in my head would they shoot themselves to escape that which I have known to be natural? It would take a thousand human lifetimes in a thousand different people in a thousand different timelines to begin to understand one human compared to the next. I am just one. I only have my shoes to fill and they are small at that. 

What in our mind makes sense of a difficult situation and determines it as pain? Why would we choose to interpret pain, why not leave that nerve impulse out there to linger as an unidentified synaptic electrical response? Why does the brain send something to counteract this pain when it could so easily distract, ignore it? 

Why do I choose to feel anything? After all, the good cannot exist without the bad, so if I remove the good or the positive from baseline, do I then remove the negative? Sometimes I would gladly give up good to end the pain for others. To end any pain, mental or physical for which there is no difference. Ending world hunger, after all, means to reduce the population. This means more food available for those who are left. Let’s end violence and kill off anyone who commits a crime or gets a psychological profile of a criminal. Why don’t we go ahead and determine that when something is “unhealthy” we get rid of the healthy foods, therefore the “unhealthy” is the new normal and a whole new breed of even unhealthier foods like Raid bug retardant hamburgers will have to exist. 

These questions, not even from a man capable of understanding the answers, or if there are answers at all. What these questions do is help better understand why we do what we do, why we avoid pain and run to pleasure. We know, our subconscious knows, that pleasure does not solve our problems, it merely gives us a taste of the closest thing to heaven we can find. Some people are so hurt, so lost, so in pain, unable to live in their own baseline that they want heaven all the time. People who overeat, those who abuse drugs, sex addicts, people who cannot lived balance on anything, all searching for something outside of themselves. Something to make them “better.” The only problem is that they are going about a noble cause in the wrong way. For if heaven is what they want, heaven is what is offered, only believing and asking to get there. To live a life here of meager means, noble traits, and patience for the gift comes later. 

Why do we struggle with the idea that our way is not the best? Why would we still look to anything here, on this dying planet as our savior when it is the only thing that cause pain? People blame God and seem to be OK with this argument. Disagreeing with God means you acknowledge his infinite power and that you went straight to the top prior to blaming anything you or any other man has done. We do believe, even non-believers try to prove the God does not exist, rather than that what they believe does. We are flawed, that much any person can admit to. We are born into pain, we die from pain, we live in pain, some of us even look to the pain versus the alternative. 

Humans, the species so small in the entire animal kingdom, has this thing. This part of our brain that allows us insight, decision making, intent. We have this magical ability to intend something, alter chemical responses and become driven for that thing. The rest of us, the primal portion then sets up defenses preventing people from seeing the struggling parts of us, the parts that if exposed will destroy us. This turmoil, this anguish, all of the “bad” parts of life, all thrown in a pot only to be something we avoid rather than something to teach. After all, we only learn through experience. We remember the negative more than the positive, and I only appreciate my two, functional legs when I see someone that doesn’t have them. 

Maybe instead of the “bad” being from the devil himself, maybe the pain God has allowed is more necessary than the parts which comfort.

I write this in a state of comfort. My chair, my legs, the temperature in this room, all things set at a comfortable level. I have food in my stomach, I have more food afterwards. I have a family who for all we know is healthy (for health is not always so obvious). These things are among the millions and millions of examples that God could use to teach me something. For right now, he is teaching how to appreciate, be. What I am not void of. What parts of me I tend to take for granted on a Tuesday at 11AM. Why this time? This time is a passive time in a work week. It is easy to shift focus on to what is coming up, versus that moment, at work, at my desk, writing.

If I were in pain, this writing may be different. Maybe that writing would be more authentic. Maybe pain is sent here to give us a glimpse into hell, just like pleasure reminds us of heaven. I do not choose pain, so therefore my primal intent is to avoid hell. If I would have never felt pain, or lost, or anxiety, or jealousy, or hurt, if I would have never went through reminders of patience or been reminded of what a non-healthy body feels like to give me a glimpse of an eternal state like that, then I may have never chose to do right. 

All things are necessary and therefore from the perspective of life are neither good nor bad, only are. Nothing can exist without the other, except for God. He exists, period, there is the answer to many of the unanswerable questions. The problem people who do not believe are trying to solve. The love people seek in others or substances. The misplaced drive for worldly things when we all know we are going to die. This existence, which cannot be understood by man in this human state, is here to answer all because he is all. 

This means that even the deadliest of pain, the worst of tortures, the sickest things humans perceive all are part of a plan set in motion Milena ago and continue to run through today. C.S. Lewis depicted nature with intent to die. It is what nature does. It is made to destroy itself. We are made to die, it is our purpose. There is a reason the brain copes, learns to adapt with something that at one point we might not have perceived as possible. 

This is not a religious thing, but a fact-checking statement. Anything perceived as detrimental or wrong or the argument for Christ as to why, is intensely its own answer. The questions about pain answers the need for it. The fact I can write this today, or that the words exist at all, even though they are regurgitated from my brains interpretations from earlier material in life, the only reason this material exists is because of the reason to write it. Pain exists to remind us to avoid pain. Being is all that is wrong and right with the world and it is up to our allowance of thought as to the level of pain we experience.