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!

Are You Functioning on all Wavelengths?

I remember my Dad saying some people don’t function on certain wavelengths.  Like, for example, an insensitive neighbour who would say hurtful things to almost everyone she met, but was oblivious to the effects of her barbed comments.  I could see what he meant by that and years of teaching seemed to clarify such things.  He would point out that, if a child came from a family where honesty was not insisted upon then often the entire next generation was devoid of any scruples in that particular arena.  It was indeed as if an entire wavelength of understanding was missing.  It was appropriate to take pens, pencils, money etc as long as no one spotted you.  The older I get, the more I realize that each of us has our own missing wavelengths and tests and difficulties come along and show us exactly what we have not yet mastered.  My middle son was highly tuned to people around him.  

He could sense their unhappiness, joy, intent to a degree that startled me.  I suppose you could call it intuition.  Some years ago my mother fell down a flight of stairs in a hotel and I was startled to find seconds later my son appeared.  He had sensed something wrong and run all the way from home to the hotel.  It is hard to use science to explain how such things happen.  When we had visitors, my son would whisper to me, how sad this one appeared. He didn’t seem to need to speak to them to pick up on what they were feeling.  I, instead, had inherited my Dad’s lack of intuition.  We used to joke that when buying a new car we would ask Dad which car in the whole parking lot he liked, then make sure that whatever car we decided to buy, it was not the one he picked, as it was sure to be a dud!

Walking down a street one day my middle son said “did you see that man Mum he was crying as he came out of the shop?”  My youngest son had seen the man but not noticed he was crying and my eldest had neither noticed the man nor the shop.  We seem to inhabit almost different worlds at times.  I suppose you would call it a kind of emotional intelligence.  Either you have it or you don’t.  But, if life has a purpose then surely progress is required and if we are missing wavelengths we need to focus on the ones missing and fast.  Nothing highlights gaps in our wavelengths better than learning from those who are sensitive to those very areas.  If our filters are set to cut out certain parts of the spectrum we cannot rely on our own eyes and senses to spot them.  We require to have around us those, whose filters are on a completely different range.  It can be painful to see the world anew or learn that we are not seeing enough.  Challenging to have it drawn to our attention.  But I have grown to respect that such people open us up to, not only a new world out there but, a whole world inside us that has been neglected.  We need all the wavelengths functioning!