May your pain be short and your pleasure long!

I have always been bad with pain.  The tiniest cut, from an early age, brought forth howls of despair. Usually, this would be followed by requests for bandages, the bigger the better.  At times my mother was placing bandages on wounds that were so small she could not even see them.  As I grew older, I became aware that I had a remarkably low pain threshold.  Watching other children in school fall and bleed only to get up and run off amazed me.  As I progressed through adolescence my mother would remark, “What on earth are you going do when you have to give birth?”  It was one of those questions that an adolescence feels a parent asks just to manipulate you.  Akin, to her other favourite, “You must learn to cook and clean now because one day you will have your own house!”  To this I always smugly replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll always have servants!”  This must have been particularly abrasive to my sweet mother who carried trays of breakfast to all of us in bed every morning, while Don Williams filled the house with his songs.  I only have to hear one of his songs to find myself hungering for tea and toast on a tray.

Being a coward about pain I asked everyone about what giving birth was really like.  One said it was the most amazing experience of her life.  Another babbled on about this small baby and how beautiful it was.  A third said ominously that one soon forgets the pain.  My mother said, in her day, you were expected to give birth in silence, a slight whimpering was tolerated but not for long.  You were expected to approach birthing in a ladylike way.  She looked at me with a forlorn expression before repeating, “I really don’t know how you will ever get through it!”  When I was pregnant people became much more honest.  One friend told me it was like having a knife plunged into your innards and twisted.  This was altogether too frighteningly honest I felt.

True to form, I was racing to hospital with every little twinge convinced the birth was imminent.  Surely, such excruciating squeezes meant the baby was on their way.   Medical staff said, in ominous tones, I would know it when the real contractions began.  Then, when the murderous contractions actually kicked in I understood exactly what they meant.  I distinctly remember not being ladylike about the whole business.  When asked about pain relief, I retorted “give me everything you’ve got and if that doesn’t work get a big club and knock me out”. At one point, I remember clearly instructing the medical staff to cut off my head and haul the baby out that way.   

My sister-in-law had an even more painful birth but within a matter of hours was saying she would be happy to have another baby soon.  It was as if her memory had selectively eradicated all the pain and suffering.  Today when reading a book, it suddenly all made sense.  It is by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, entitled Thinking Fast and Slow.  It helps you understand why we make the choices we do in life.  In one section they carry out an experiment on a group of subjects.  The experiment was simple; each person would have their hand immersed in cold water 14 degrees for 60 seconds and at the end would be given a warm towel.  The second experiment lasted 90 seconds, the first 60 seconds was identical to the first and then for the last 30 seconds warm water would be bringing the temperature up by one degree.  The third experiment subjects were told would be a repeat of either the short or long experiment.  They were allowed to choose which.  A surprising 80% chose the 90 second immersion.  Despite this being obviously longer that the first.  What was going on?  According to Kahneman,

“The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worst experience; they simple made a mistake.  They chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less aversive memory.  Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least.”

We are strongly influenced by the peak and the end.  That feeling of warming water was such a relief after the pain of the cold it managed to over-ride our rational brain.  Obviously, endings when dramatic/traumatic enough reach parts of our brain that have little to do with rational fact but are emotionally powerful.  Our intuition has lead us to make a mistake.  So too, the pain of giving birth when followed by the joy of a baby is simply edited out.

I used to find when teaching a class you could give a truly awful 40-minute lesson, boring, stilted with little content and follow it with a five-minute exciting game to end.  The classes would invariably close with kids laughing delightedly and a feeling that the lesson had been brilliant.  They had been fooled by the end.  It had dominated their experience and effectively wiped out the previous dire 40 minutes.  This influence also indicates why coping with dementia or a pain filled death etc. creates such an overriding despair in relatives.  A whole lifetime is forgotten and the agony of the last months or years over rides everything.  It almost manages to wipe out every joyous memory of a loved one. 

Our intuition is a powerful tool but also a flawed one, on occasion.  Or, as Kahneman puts it,

“It seems an inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.” 

Our memory has evolved to register the most intense moment (pain or pleasure the peak) and the feelings at the end of the episode.  This neglect of the duration will not serve our desire for pain to be short and pleasure to last.  In other words our instinctive preferences may be seriously flawed.  He ends with this warning.

“This is a bad case of duration neglect.  You are giving the good and the bad part of your experience equal weight, although the good part lasted ten times as long as the other.”

My wish for you - May your pain be ever short and your pleasure exceedingly long!

"How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

We are born, we live and we die.  Life on this material plane exists of these three stages.  Birth is pretty traumatic, you emerge down a narrow restrictive channel bruised, bleeding and gasping for air.  Dying, I’m told can be pretty traumatic too.  Again, gasping for that last breath, facing darkness and feeling battered from holding on to life. What about the in between?  Well, living that gap between birth and death, can be bloody, breath taking and you invariably find yourself in the dark at times.

So what do we learn from all this?  For one, I tend to find the whole idea of re-birthing hogwash.  As if repeating the birthing experience as an adult can exorcise what went wrong first time around.  I feel the same way about reincarnation, the idea of having to live another life again, how depressing and repetitive.  I also am heartily fed up of listening to people who claim they were Princess Antoinette, or the Queen of Sheba in a previous life.  Please, isn’t living one life sufficient and having the notion of endless repeat attempts an admission of failure (a sort of university of life, examination resit schedule for the chronically incapable)? And doesn’t having that notion of endless repeat attempts steal from this one life the priceless unique opportunity that it really is.  Much as some would prefer to think otherwise, this is it folks, no rehearsals, no second takes we have only one shot.

You cannot even prepare the baby within for that shock of birth.  No stroking of that bump or careful explanations of the coming process can help.  Pre-natal classes, prepare parents but we are kidding ourselves if we think they make a major difference to the actual experience ahead for the baby.  Being born is traumatic.  Having a chilled out mother perhaps reduces adrenalin flowing to the baby, a darkened room helps reduce the shock of bright lights on the newborn, a quiet delivery room avoids the noise assault experienced somewhat.  The voices of family members, whose voices are familiar, can be comforting, but who are we kidding here.  Birth is traumatic for a reason.  Without that shock perhaps that first vital breath is not taken.  Indeed some babies require removal of fluid from their airways and a jolt to the body to get truly going.  Transition is painful, by definition there is a letting go of what one has become accustomed to.  We can have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next phase of our life.

By contrast, dying can sometimes be incredibly peaceful too.  Weariness, deep tiredness to the bone can anaesthetise that final transition.  Sleep is referred to as ‘the little death’ for many reasons.  It is also a surrendering to oblivion, to a different state.  So, if our physical life is like bookends, with birth and death at either end, perhaps there are lessons that can be learned and applied.  Not being afraid will help reduce the trauma, a peaceful environment soothes the spirit (not easily found in the modern hospital environment) and being surrounded by those closest, remind you that you are not alone even at this final moment and wrap you in that greatest comfort blanket of all, love.  I chose to think that we are then, freed of our physical body much as when you remove the cage, the bird is finally free to fly.  This transition is traumatic but necessary.  At a recent funeral a family friend was speaking to the audience of mourners and pointed out that death is not a shameful and fearful thing to which the recently departed loved one has been subjected to.  It is a part of life, like birth and a path each one of us sooner or later will take.  He then asked the question, “How should we view death?”  and gave this quote as an answer,  "How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

So, what about that period in the middle called life?  Well, it can be traumatic but then that usually  means a time of change has come.  Be comforted that you are at a turn in the road and a time of transition.  You may well be a little bloodied, somewhat in the dark, not sure of the way ahead, but don't forget to enjoy the journey.