Pain is Universal
Whether it’s physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual in nature, all human beings experience pain. We endure losses, sustain injuries, experience trauma, face betrayal, and suffer injustice, among other woes. Some people seem to experience more pain than others do, and all too often they suffer in silence or outside of our awareness, but no one escapes pain’s grip. As the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa observed, “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”[1]
Questions of Why?
Painful experiences often prompt us to ask questions, and especially questions of why?
Why is this happening?
Why could I not prevent it?
Why now?
Why me?
Both my personal and professional experience convince me that, more often than not, these questions of why have less to do with a search for explanatory answers and more to do with expressing grief or anguish. In other words, I ask why to express the depth of my loss, injury, trauma, betrayal, or injustice—to voice the intensity of my pain. Similarly, I ask why me to convey that my soul aches or that my heart breaks.
Of course, all too often these questions of why also resist satisfactory answers. For example, considering the possibility that I have Parkinson’s disease because I have a genetic predisposition for it, and, at some point, I came into contact with certain pesticides that triggered it (a theory backed by Parkinson’s experts), does little to help me feel better, to live better, or to find a measure of peace. Sure, I want to know what causes Parkinson’s, mostly in order to protect my children and others from it. Yet no one can do anything about why I have this disease. I have it. And it’s not going away, at least not anytime soon.
Consequently, speculating on answers to the whys may have at least two negative outcomes. First, it wastes time and energy. Second, when tied to strong feelings of regret or bitterness, it can hold us back and even prove destructive.
Questions of Meaning
A different question may offer something more beneficial, namely, the question, “So what?”
So what does having Parkinson’s mean for my life? So what will it teach me: about myself and other people; about my values and priorities; about disappointment and regret; about a life lived more intentionally and with purpose? So what good can I do because I have Parkinson’s? These questions push us forward and can also be constructive.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, neurologist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel recognizes the value of so what questions. Recounting his experience of living in concentration camps, he notes that the prisoners who fared best had identified a purpose that lifted them each day, and especially when facing the great challenges of life in this horrific setting. Those driven by so what questions found meaning, even in their living Hell, because they had a purpose, and they drew strength from this meaning. They asked, so what can I do to help me see my child again? So what will my spouse and I do when we are reunited? So what will it be like to go back to my business once the war is over? So what can I do today to help another person find purpose and ways to survive?
As Frankel wrote of the men he lived among, “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”[2]
Perhaps, then, those of us living with Parkinson’s, or with another chronic illness, or with other kinds of pain–all of us–do best to ask fewer why questions and more so what questions.
Perhaps lingering on the questions of meaning serve us best.
After all, we can find meaning in our struggles and purpose for going forward; and this discovery can help us not merely to survive, it can also ease our pain, give us hope, and, as I have found, even bring us joy.
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[1] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Rhinebeck, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), 183-184.
[2] Viktor E. Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 82.
Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is author or editor of 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. Currently, he is writing a book on counseling people with Parkinson’s disease, which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Follow him on Twitter @PDWiseBlog