We live in a world of shadow and light, pain and joy. We spend our entire lives investigating the many possible patterns of human experience including interactions between humankind and nature and with one another. We must learn from our chronicles and assist future generations by living a fully engaged life attempting to ascertain how to live in an authentic and joyous manner.

Pain is a crucial part of our reality; it awakens a person from a mental stupor. A person must never be afraid to discover where their pain originates, follow pain to where it emanates from, learn from its messages, and reject the mindless business and busyness of contemporary culture in order to fuel an artistic vision of the self.

Pain is essential for survival, pain is the tangible material that creeps into our mind and screams at us to recognize that something is terribly wrong.

Without experiencing personal pain, there would be no bases for expressing reciprocal compassion.

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.

Pain touches everyone differently. Some people suffer from a genetic defect that weakens and kills their pain neurons. People who are unable to register physical pain usually die young because they lack an essential survival monitor that tells them how to protect themselves.

We cannot achieve personal enlightenment – a clarification of our souls – until we cease deluding ourselves. We must accept that life includes witnessing and personally experiencing pain.

Writing acts as a means to blunt pain and defer death by encouraging a person to live in an alternative manner.

Experiencing terrible pain opens our hearts and minds to express compassion for other people and communion with ourselves.