Love, pain, and courage

"What I'm trying to say is that the pain then is part of the happiness now. That's the deal."
Joy Gresham, Shadowlands

As I watched Shadowlands, again, tonight, for the 2000th time, I was struck by how true that statement was. All the pain of love and loss we feel in our life. All that pain is a part of the happiness we experience with the love. It's just part of the deal.

It's ironic. People spend so much of their life trying to avoid the pain. To dull it. To escape it.

But the truth is that it just comes with the deal. The pain is a part of the love. It's just part of the package. And trying to hold off one just limits our access to the other.

We should limit unnecessary pain. Pain that serves no purpose. That is the essence of the current political debates. But it also the essence of so many of the choices we face. Trying to tell the difference.

It is all the more difficult to tell when we impose pain that serves to alienate those that we say that we love. Pain should be a function of genuine love. And genuine love for people does not seek to control them. It sets them free.

Control is suspicious of love, because love involves pain. And some people would prefer the fragility that comes with control to the courage of love because love involves pain. And, for some people, perhaps most people, at some level, avoiding pain is their singular, fragile, and ignoble aim in life.

And that kind of life is its own punishment. Because it is a life bereft of real love.