What doesn´t kill you makes you stronger?

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - persistently was persuading me Kelly Clarkson, as I was trying to mutilate myself on a treadmill, finding pain in the parts of the body which were dormant for most of my life and feeling aching organs that I had no idea existed in my body before.

Source of photo (and an interesting blog about running)

Being half-conscious, to divert my mind from the pain purely out of survival precaution, I started thinking if is that really so - do we really need pain to grow? Does a person, who is blessed by a peaceful and quiet life, undisturbed by any sorts of turbulence, come up as an physical, emotional, spiritual cripple? And to follow the other extreme: going to the hell and back creates, basically, a superman? (oh, sorry, I meant a superwoman).

What happens if one doesn't get enough pain through life? Lets say, there's a moderately happily married life with 10 years on the back and two kids on the front. Then, one day there comes a realisation that the chest starts sliding down and actively forming a paunch, social networking becomes the most exciting thing, beer and caffeine have replaced water, in general - things have got out of control.

And there it starts - subconsciously,  persistently,  methodically we start to generate our own suffrage to get out of the couch and back on a horse: to be emotionally fit one gets an unobtainable love object - the wife of a neighbour will do, a colleague with its regularity of meetings is even better. After all the person doesn't matter - it is just is to train emotions, as Robbie Williams was confiding into my ears: "just want to feel real love, feel the home that I live in".  Next step is to ruin the family, get a divorce, see kids once a month, live alone and start looking for the meaning of life - all of these  to be spiritually fit and growing even further.

But what if we stay motionless in your moderately happily life? We stop being interesting to people - the absence of drama makes us lose colours and mimicry with the life itself. The most interesting people, writers, artists, politicians, actors, even "that nephew of the guy who lives next door", are the people with the wretched life and an ongoing crisis.

And we still think we are going for pleasure? That's our eternal shallow delusion, a trick formed by our refined inventive artful psyche, which wraps a bitter pill into the sweetness of a minute pleasure. "Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure" - floated the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald somewhere in my already half-conscious mind.

By following our unnecessary immediate wishes, overindulging in foods, sweets, tastes, with all sorts of social infidelities, we are methodically paving the way to our own abyss, so that later we would have a chance to apply all our strengths to get out of and become stronger, fitter, smarter. Or drown and die.

So, stating the obvious for everyone but me, I came to a conclusion, which helped me to finish those last minutes on the treadmill - that we need regular injections of pain, leading to suffrage, produced by our internal striving for crises. "Everything in moderation" - refrained Ancient Greeks in my head to beautiful Kelly, and I decided that was enough for the day.  

The song ended, treadmill stopped, I took out the earphones, and with a feeling of standing on the way to perfection, went home thinking about mundane things as what to cook for dinner for my moderately handsome husband who was babysitting our inquisitive beautiful baby-daughter, secretly thanking Providence for all that boring uneventful life that I was blessed with, hoping I was done with my pains at least till my next gym.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson