Pain Can't Be Measured with a Ruler

My grandmother didn't do motivational speeches.

She was more the type to say:

"Don't cry."

"Hurry up."

"Come on, get it done."

And then she'd feed you.

In her version there existed a peculiar ratio of toughness, practicality and love that I've never quite encountered in anyone else.

She lived through a very hard childhood, and I think it left her with the conviction that life tends to be difficult, but one doesn't have to keep commenting on it.

You do what can be done.

You take care of your people.

And when someone is hungry, you feed them first — we can philosophize afterwards.

She never told me:

"You're not the only one who feels pain. And you're not the only one who can handle it."

But somehow that's exactly what she said with everything else.

I was an only child who was never really alone

I had no siblings.

But I had my uncles' and aunts' kids, friends from the neighborhood, and enough people around me that I never knew much of that only-child feeling.

We played spies.

Scientists.

Rode bikes and roller skates.

Built forts.

And of course we conducted very serious geopolitical conflicts with a hostile gang of kids who wanted to tear them down.

My grandma and grandpa lived there, and I spent a lot of time at their place because my mom worked shifts.

My dad was in Bulgaria.

So my childhood existed, in a way, in two worlds.

In Bansko, kids were everywhere

My dad comes from Bulgaria, and a big part of his family lives in Bansko.

Today Bansko is a famous ski town full of people from all over the world.

But my childhood Bansko looked different.

Homemade carts.

Horses.

Work in the fields.

Neighbors who helped each other out.

Grandpa and a donkey heading into the woods for firewood.

And above all, enormous gangs of kids.

Ten, fifteen children running around the whole town in the summer heat until deep into the evening.

The older ones automatically looked after the younger ones.

There were far fewer cars.

Far more kids.

I was maybe three, and after a longer stay in Czechia I'd half-forgotten my Bulgarian again.

So I communicated with hands, feet and facial expressions.

It turns out three-year-olds don't need a very sophisticated communication protocol for a shared adventure.

Bansko was a little dirtier, a little wilder and very much alive.

On some paths you hopped between cow pats roughly like Mario.

Today those paths are different.

But the neighbors I know there still have something of that old closeness.

When you arrive after a long time, they want to know how you're doing.

Genuinely want to know.

Maybe that's why I love mountains

Bansko sits in the mountains.

And my Czech grandfather was also an undeterrable mountain man.

He had serious heart problems all his life.

Luckily I didn't inherit the heart trouble, but the wandering sickness... that one's mine.

All credit to my grandfather: given his health, he had plenty of very good reasons for a quiet life, and still something kept pulling him up some hill.

That's probably also why I'm fascinated by people like Dina Štěrbová, Klára Kolouchová or Renata Chlumská.

Not just because of where they managed to climb.

More because in the mountains you can see, beautifully, something that holds down below too:

you can't fully decide the conditions.

The weather doesn't ask.

The mountain doesn't ask.

Sometimes the body doesn't ask either.

You can only observe what is, right now, and take the next step accordingly.

Or turn around.

Turning around is sometimes the right mountaineering decision too.

I like that.

For a long time I thought other people understood the world

Maybe you know the feeling.

As a child I had the sense that adults roughly knew what they were doing.

That they understood the world.

Money.

Relationships.

Work.

Why people behave the way they behave.

And that I simply didn't have access to some manual yet.

Gradually I discovered two things.

First: there apparently is no manual.

Second: adults often don't know either.

My parents had their own difficult story.

They fought.

Eventually my mom decided to leave, and we stayed in Czechia.

Dad went on living in Bulgaria.

For a long time I saw some things mainly through the eyes of a child who feels it's her fault... that she should somehow fix it.

But the older I get, the more I can see a second layer alongside that. People do as much as they can manage... even knowing you could do more and not doing it is a kind of collision with your own limits. People often don't mean harm; they just can't do otherwise. There's no logic to it, at least none comprehensible to the remaining seven billion people. The unique imprint of one particular mind.

Not us, not our parents, not the other people around us...

Nobody is born with the ability to handle everything perfectly.

People often make the best decision they're capable of at that moment, with what they have.

And sometimes it still hurts others.

Both of those things can be true at once.

Understanding doesn't mean excusing

This distinction feels important to me.

I can understand why someone did something, and still think it wasn't okay.

I can love someone and set a boundary at the same time.

I can see their pain and still not take responsibility for what they do with it.

Maybe this is one of the hardest forms of kindness.

Not making a villain out of the other person.

But not making an emergency rescue service out of yourself either.

Pain really is hard to compare

Over my life I've met a lot of people.

Some went through things that make you wonder:

How does anyone even carry this?

And they're kind, cheerful, and keep doing their thing.

Another person can be completely flattened by something an outsider would call a much smaller problem.

The human brain loves to compare, to sort... it loves scales... circle one option.

Except that's definitely not how it is... it's such a colorful tangle of possibilities.

Every person has a different body.

A different psyche.

Different experiences.

A different history.

Different people around them.

We never move perfectly into another person and experience their world exactly as they do.

Our greatest pain is simply the greatest pain we know. And the same goes for everyone else's.

And that's enough.

Two arrows

I love the Buddhist parable of the two arrows.

The first arrow is the pain that flies in from outside.

Loss.

Illness.

A breakup.

Rejection.

Fear.

Something that happened and that we often didn't choose at all.

And then there's the second arrow.

That one we sometimes fire ourselves.

"This shouldn't have happened to me."

"Everyone else has it easier."

"This will never be good again."

"There's something wrong with me."

"Until that person changes, I can't be okay."

I don't like this idea because it would say:

Your suffering is your own fault.

That would be not only untrue but also quite cruel.

I like it because it reminds me that even when I have no control over the first arrow, sometimes I can at least influence how many more I add myself.

Between what happened and what I do next, there can be a small space.

And sometimes there's a surprising amount of freedom in that space.

Optimism isn't pretending nothing's wrong

I like optimistic people.

Not the ones who answer every tragedy with a picture of a sunset and a sentence about positive mindset.

Those I'd occasionally love to send, very positively, somewhere.

Ok, I'm kidding... it just sounded nice. Mostly I don't care.

Anyway... I mean a different kind of optimism.

The kind that can look at an unpleasant thing and say:

Yes.

This is really bad.

Now what?

Maybe that's what I've learned most from the people around me.

From my grandma.

From friends.

From people who went through something hard and still didn't lose the ability to love the world.

For me, optimism isn't the conviction that everything will turn out fine.

Nobody simply knows that.

It's more the conviction that even if something doesn't turn out fine, there will probably still be some kind of onward.

Maybe completely different from what we wanted.

But onward.

Some days we don't have to solve our whole life

When things are heavy, we often want to solve everything at once.

What will happen in five years.

How the relationship will turn out.

Whether there will be enough money.

Whether we made the right decisions.

Whether we've broken something beyond repair.

What helps me is coming back to a much smaller question:

What can I do now?

Sometimes the answer is big.

Leave.

Change jobs.

Ask for help.

Finally say something important.

But often the answer is completely ordinary.

Get some sleep.

Eat something.

Go outside.

Call someone.

Not solve anything else today.

Try again in the morning.

Or just stay quietly in the heavy feeling for a while... with humility and faith that it will pass, that even this has its meaning.

Grandma probably wouldn't have made a big philosophy out of it.

She would most likely have put something on the table and said:

"Eat."

And maybe there's more wisdom in that than I suspected as a child.

Not every pain has to be understood immediately.

Not every life story has to be resolved.

Some things just need to be carried for a while.

Ideally not entirely alone.

And then take the next step again.