Pain teaches us the harder lessons

When times in your life come that you must go through pain, that your body or your emotions must take a toll because of something horrible that's happened, try and see the lesson. Try and see the message the pain may carry. It may be a success, love or miracle in disguise. And it takes a little bit of stepping back sometimes and looking, reassesing the pain with a new eye that you may realise, 'so, this is the lesson', or that 'it's this new fruitful direction I must take from hereforth'.

I felt it. Massive, grievesome pain recently. And because of that pain, today I appreciate life better - or at least started to. I look at life with a new cleansed eye. It's almost like the pain was there to say 'Izz, you getting wayyyyyy too sloppy at your game. At the game of life'. And it was of course a rude awakening. It made me rethink my ways of living with others. My ways of understanding things. My ways of speaking about things.

During, or rather, post that pain, I kind of thought of the blacksmith or shall I say blacksmithing (don't know the science's name). I thought of a metal that's taken an odd and unappreciative form of its own. And for it to change, for it to become a metal of better, meaningful shape, the blacksmith needs to put it through a furnace. An extreme, supernatural degree of heat and even after that, beat the hell out of it with a fiver pounder. Only after sometime in that heat and massive hammering will the metal give away its stubborness and release its ill-form and take on a new shape.

You and I are blacksmiths of our lives. Of our destinies and habits. But we need that furnace in order to change our metal to a form that is useful. A beautiful form that can be better appreciated. Pain tutors us to absorb the harder, more difficult lessons that we otherwise would not have the ability to understand in our normal merry state.

Basically, the long and short of it is that: Allow yourself to see the lessons, messsage, intent, reason or objective for that pain in your life to be. Why is it there? Everything in this world for a reason - don't the wise say!. So that pain is something else in disguise. Think upon that will you. I'm grafting on it as I write.

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This too shall pass

Life gets busy. Life gets tough. And in the midst of it all, we get hurt by various things in our lives. Be it because someone we love and respect has let us down, loss, temporary setbacks, sickness, disappointment or dreams and goals that we keep procrastinating – all this can and do make up part and puzzle of our days.

During such soul tormenting times we just feel less the marvels that we truly are. We feel that life and our fellow humans are unfair and we lose the hope that got us this far and through other bumps in the past. But if you think of it, whatever significant bump you find yourself against, it will pass. Like others before it, this too shall pass.

In 1998 I was briefly hospitalised after my body was arrested by a rare seizure of some sort. The acute pain put me in some state of near-paralysis and I couldn’t walk – although I could try, I caused myself monstrous pain. Got to hospital with my mother, who seemed to be in equal pain at the view of her son’s anguish, and I was told that I would never father a single baby in my life. That whatever happened, has managed to deny me the opportunity to reproduce.

As you can imagine, the pain grew a hundred-fold as it was elevated to emotional torture than just physical by the Cuban surgeon’s sad breaking news. To say the least, I was the saddest man on earth during that period – or so I thought.

After some days, I was home recovering from an equally painful operation, I was told by someone very close to me that what happened means I must just give it up. That there isn’t a point in living any longer. At that moment, when I heard those words, I swore to myself that I will make things great for myself. That this too shall pass and I will make things right. The person who told me to give it up would be shocked to learn that the bad patch did pass indeed, although at that period I believed it never would. And today I enjoy the beautiful love and smiles of my two wonderful daughters, princess Talia and princes Nalika.

So, whatever you’re going through today. Right now. Just know one thing for sure: this too shall pass.

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