Why do we hurt?

Unlike animals that do feel pain but will only give a grant and some rumbled sounds, this pain will have no better explanation, yet humans do. A grasshopper will lose one of its limbs but will still drag its body to move on while a human being will whine and scream to the pain that has gone too far for them to contain. Humans have a lot of meaning they attach to what they feel and therefore will always look out for ways of running away from conditions that will cause them pain; they will keep very far where they sense say a fire and thus find ways of preventing it. Humans hurt because life is tough. Life’s journey is filled with ecstasies including the good, the bad, the painful and the not so pleasant; how then do we experience all the good and never want to endure the painful part at all? According Frank T Vertosick Jr in his book ‘The Natural History Of Pain’ he says that one of the major sources of human pain and hurt is selfishness; it is our way or no way. Everything has to come to their satisfaction to make them happy and this is not true all the time. The truth is that there’s need for some painful experiences in life and these will eventually make the human soul a little bit stronger because bad experiences teach good lessons and prepare you for life’s missions. While it is nice to fall in love, to get married, to have babies, to have a college education, to get a wonderful job and to live happily ever after, our expectations that things have to be nice all the time, violates the law of life. But later when your love gets cold and marriages fall apart when you lose a job and then your best friend betrays you, you seem to experience the worst and greatest crash of your life. Life becomes meaningless because you are hurting so much and you don’t want to see anything else at that time. A young man who married the most attractive lady in town everyone appreciated was battered with pain when one night he returned from work, only to discover that his wife’s high school boyfriend had come to town to visit her. She later admitted her affair with her lover and eventually had to run away with him and left her kids behind. So much happiness created by romantic love; as powerful as such happiness does it ever last…the greatest source of happiness could be the greatest source of pain; life is never the same after a betrayal. Some people will recover while others will nurse the wounds the rest of their life. Some people become paranoid and less trusting of others, they do not realize they are creating their own hell on earth because they refuse to let go. Reality hits them in their faces when they finally discover that the more they pull anything in their lives the easier it breaks, some painful experiences are unexpected and so we can’t run away from them because we cannot prevent a parent from dying or a family member from leaving us. While they try to go to a better place we want to selfishly hold them back because we are worried of hurting; physical and emotional pain are all ways humans hurt much as we can stay away from the physical ones where we sense their potential occurrence we can never tell when the emotional ones will come until when they are here and so we hurt. Email: laura2jos@yahoo.com