"Iron, left in the rain
And fog and dew,
With rust is covered. -Pain
Rusts into beauty too....
- Mary Caroline Davies
Our pain is ours. Some of it we have earned, the
rest not, and it is still our own. When we fight our pain,
we fight the experience of our humanness, and we
lose ourselves in the process. A life without pain is
a life of nonliving. Our pain lets us know and come
to understand the full meaning of being human. If
we fight the normal experience of our pain, we lose
the possibility of experiencing the process of its
rusting "into beauty too."
We don't need to seek pain, but when it is inevitably
there, we have the possibility of something
new entering our lives.
MY PAIN is a possibility. It is not a liability or a punishment.
- Anne Wilson Schaef