I just got home from a session at Park Meadows Pilates and Physical Therapy. This facility and the service it offers, is perfect for me right now as I rehabilitate after 3 surgeries. One of the things that makes this place special is the attention to individual issues, even in a class setting. When I am in an easy class and I don’t feel like telling my whole story, I often say something like, “I had surgery on my arm.” This alerts the instructor just enough to alter things for me when we are working my gimpy side, without the whole class getting silent and trying to sneak peeks at my chest. Tonight I was braver and decided honesty was the best policy, since I have recently graduated to a 2nd level class, and there might be some things I can’t yet do. I laughed out loud and apologized to the women next to me, who because of my tale of woe, felt that she could not complain about her ailments, which were probably more sports related. I am a hard act to follow in this setting.
The truth of the matter is that this woman paid the same amount of money and took the same time out of her day to come get rehabilitated. Her pain is not extinguished because my story is more dramatic. She deserves the same amount of time and attention in this setting as I do. Yet I could see that my story had made her feel that her pain was not as real as mine. Wrong. Her pain is just different.
Life has challenges even in the best of times, and while it is not healthy to cry over spilled milk, a day full of spilled milk can feel almost as bad as something far more devastating. Our bandwidth for difficulty can get used up, even when our life is on the right track overall.
If you grew up in a home similar to mine, you may have eaten a few vegetables, simply because there were starving people in China. Unless you were like my brother, Paul, who silently spooned his peas onto the floor, in a rare act of disobedience, you probably thought about how awful it would be to suffer without any food, and ate those peas. Our reason for thinking, saying or doing anything should not simply be related to the plight of others. It should be an authentic evaluation of our own situation and a thoughtful response to it.
Pain, emotional or physical, has to be dealt with if we are going to operate at full capacity. Pretending it does not exist or isn’t important enough, is what leads to suppressed hurt, anger or even shame. These emotions, when left unattended, can lead to volcanic eruptions in our emotional and physical life. Quite simply, this is bad.
Honestly, we cannot compare our suffering across the board. Suffering is often dependent on factors outside the obvious trauma or situation. For example, one person’s experience with divorce might be completely different than another’s, depending on the relationships in each person’s life, the reasons behind the divorce and the level of hopefulness experienced by the individual. The same goes for losing a loved one, a fatal illness, job loss, or any number of daily frustrations that come our way. Opening our thought processes up to the responsibility we have in creating healthy relationships and hope filled lives is more important than comparing our lot in life to others.
When you or I evaluate our lives, there will always be things we wish we could change with the wave of a magic wand. However, if we are paying attention to our emotional ability to weather the storms of life, our focus should always be on relationships, situations and faith that propel us onward with enduring hope.