Pain......

Pain. Not a word that evokes positive feelings. I have been thinking, ok enough head shaking, and I have decided that the main problem with our society is that everyone will do anything possible to avoid pain. Pain is a part of life. Without some type of pain you have no way to judge triumph.

I say this not because I want myself or anyone I care about to deal with pain. I say it because I know that it is inevitable and the way we succeed is by overcoming pain and learning from pain not by avoiding it altogether. Everyone knows the adage that he (or she to be pc) who doesn’t learn from the past is doomed to repeat it. One more saying is the definition of insanity is to repeat an action over and over expecting different results. Think about it….how many times does the average person break their right leg in a lifetime? I’m thinking that most people (Evel Knievel excluded) that do it once learn from the pain.

Now that is the most overt and obvious kind of pain. There are others much more subtle and I would suggest that in many ways the most damaging. We are now living amongst a growing number of humans that think pain should not be a part of life. There can be no winners and losers. Everyone should be a winner. Once that notion takes hold than really mediocrity is born. Why would anyone give extra effort to be better if there was no reward? Losing isn’t fun. It never was meant to be. Losing is a part of learning how to win. To be fair, I have been accused, and rightly so, of being too competitive. If you grow up in a little larger family you better learn to be competitive. Some learn better than others. They generally tend to win more. Have I learned from all of my mistakes? God no but if I do repeat a mistake who can I blame for the outcome? George Bush? OK not gonna do it……..(little George Bush impression there).

I have always had a problem with some of the games played by our very young crumb crunchers in where there are no winners or losers to protect their self esteem. I would suggest that you teach a child how to be a winner and their self esteem will be much more genuine and teach a child how to deal with losing and their self esteem will also be more honest. By the way I also am against outcome based education…..I don’t care how you add it up but if you tell a child 1 plus 1 equals 3 you are setting them up for failure. Life is not about feeling good all the time about yourself. If you really want to feel good about yourself learn something new and yes even learning something new can be a lesson from some sort of pain.

That’s my sermon today. You can live your life trying to avoid pain….or you can be even more successful by learning from mistakes…..and yes pain.