I Learned Some Stuff from My Pain.
It’s been a week now. Except for the few hours of sleep I lace together each night, I’ve been in moderate or severe-moderate pain. I have learned, in these few days, a few things, or taken them more deeply for the experience.
- I am a wimp. I have hobbled around, groaned, and generally absolved myself of paying attention to the world because “It hurts.” I’ll say “millions” but we could probably conclude “billions” of people experience chronic pain, and almost certainly some additional, underlying issue, and yet many continue living in spite of it. We’ve all seen the ABC After School Specials and the Evening News pieces about people living, not quite in spite, but because of their pain. I’m not that guy.
- I have been spoiled. This is your average “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” tripe you’ve already been fed, but that bitter taste in your mouth isn’t from the entrails, it’s from truth. Only just last week, I was wondering—as I’m wont to do—about how life might be different, might carry clearer signs of What Should Be Done (and How to Do It) if I saw things through the polarizing filter of illness or disability. Yes, I am that shallow (although not quite, but I’m not inclined to explain why not just yet).
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Nurture > nature. That aforementioned disinclination extends to a building of a useful metaphor between “life” and calculus, but I really want to relate the importance in calculus of a metric defined on a set, which creates a metric space. A metric is just a standard for measuring distance, and different standards even applied to the same collection of things can produce interestingly varying results.
Consider the distance traveled by car between two buildings in an urban grid of one-way streets; and compare that to the same grid and buildings but replace the one-way streets with two-way streets. In the first case, your path has to follow more restrictive rules than in the second. This makes the for noticeably different experiences.
You might also take a chess set, and rewrite all the rules about which pieces can move in which ways (e.g., Chess 960). The effect is similar.
Well, the point here is that getting out of bed when your body likes you enough not to hurt is not quite the same endeavor as coaxing an aggravated spine to flex enough so you can tumble off the mattress. Pain makes for a different metric, and this brings into greater focus how some elderly, for instance, live in not in our world but in one made of the same points of interest set against a much less forgiving metric.
There’s a lot to work with there. We could talk about racism, health issues, sexual prejudice, disabilities, and any other differentiation that results in what we can loosely call different metrics. With any luck, we will.
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