Pain and Beauty

By Gaz

Doctor: Are you allergic to anything?

Dad: Just pain.

I believe pain is a leading cause of the appreciation of beauty. In essence pain helps us ‘expand’ our souls or put another way, to help us fully experience the human condition which in turn helps us appreciate beauty.

 When I think of pain I think of loss. That may be the loss of someone or something we loved, it might be health or something more abstract like innocence. It doesn’t really matter because that loss, for it to matter to us, creates pain which I believe expands our soul and that expansion helps us find new beauty in everyday life that we never saw before.

 I remember watching a stand-up comedian, can’t remember his name, but his theory was that everyone has the same amount of ‘happiness’ in life. His example was that if you break your leg that sucks and drops your happiness below the average but to make up for it, two months later, a walk in the park has never felt so good. I think he touched on something profound as the cliché goes ‘you never know what you have until it’s gone’. The pain of loss helps us appreciate what we have. When you know it’s the last time you’ll pet your loyal dog you grew up with, that bittersweet moment. When you know it’s most likely the last time you’ll see a sick or aging loved one, when you think back to times with your childhood memories with friends that aren’t around anymore. The lesson sinks in for even the slowest learner.

 A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer and I felt for him and his family, I truly did. I called him, we spoke, made jokes about it to help us both cope. But I never felt his pain. Now I’ve had a mole removed and odds are it’s nothing but whenever there is the potential for the big C to the final diagnosis, your heart skips a beat. Even if it turns out to be nothing, which is by far the likely outcome, I’ve lost some part of that wilful ignorance of my own mortality, it’s like I’ve seen a reflection of Death from around the corner – not quite real but I’m more aware of him now. That small loss on my part has completely changed how I view my mate’s diagnosis and what he has gone through. Now I can almost imagine the feeling in his gut when he was told. I can feel his blood pressure drop as his heart skips a beat or two. I can see his face turn white.

 Can you imagine how beautiful the sunset was that day? How much he cherished seeing his toddler run to him with a huge grin when he got home that day? How deeply he would have looked into his wife’s eyes that evening? I guarantee he would have found beauty in the everyday mundane he never appreciated quite as much. Before my own experience-lite, I would never have even considered these things but now it’s different, I can’t explain it but I’ll be damned if lunch with my family didn’t mean just a little bit more.

 All of this loss, all of this pain, it helps us see what we couldn’t see before. Helps us understand what we couldn’t understand, appreciate the beauty that was staring us smack in the face. And if I may be so bold as to guess, it’s also what gives us something to express that goes beyond words and that’s where I believe great art comes from.