Alan Watts often said in his lectures, “Imagine your ideal world, and if you really think about it, you’ll find your ideal world is the one in which you currently live.” I have done this, imagined my ideal world, really thought about it, and I’ve concluded Alan Watts is correct. If you think he’s wrong, you haven’t thought about it long enough.

And yet,

I have this vexing issue of chronic pain, originating from a place in my body the medical professionals can’t agree upon—six different doctors providing reasoned arguments for why it is not coming from the various places each of the others think it is.
Ask me at any moment of the day, Describe your ideal world, and I will respond, “I desire a world in which I don’t experience the constant sensation of a hot poker stabbing me through the loins, an afternoon that isn’t half past queasy.”

My rate of ibuprofen consumption, five hundred desperate prayers in every bottle, is evidence that I would prefer a less painful world. One might measure the level of my discomfort by the speed at which I swallow those prayers, all doomed to the same lack of response.

Pain. It is a phenomenon as natural as procreation; yet, when it is experienced, especially when it is prolonged, it is categorized as wrong. Chronic pain means something is wrong, not in the trivial sense, but in the red alert—pause everything, consult Google, what’s my insurance deductible?, how much money is in the HSA?, operate immediately or a solve it with hope and PT?, the moan and groan and woe is me—sense.

I get cranky, easily irritated. If there’s a bright side to pain, it’s the way it helps me understand the types of folks I couldn’t before. People work hard for decades so they can one day move to paradise (Florida), and once they get there, they forget to be happy. Now I know. It’s because every neuron in their bodies is screaming.

My problem isn’t pain itself; it’s the story I tell myself about it—the romantic tale of an honorable fellow, tall and strong, cursed by some malevolent power with the infirmity of pain. Now, this fellow must search the world for a cure, seeking the advice of mystics and sages in hope that one day he may be free from pain and able resume his mission of making the world better.

Silly. Imagine any other earthly creature behaving this way. A deer of a certain age, unable to leap as high or as quickly as he used to, more vulnerable than ever to the hunter’s rifle; he idles time, wringing his hooves over the fact that he’s just not the same deer he once was. It’s only a matter of time until he ends up like Bambi’s mother.
Deer don’t do that. They are too busy being deer. If only we humans were as adept at being human.

It’s a known principle in psychology: a human’s instincts for what will make him happy is reliably poor. Suppose I could manifest a world without pain. It would be a dull world; for one cannot appreciate the absence of pain without experiencing its sting. In the same way, one can’t appreciate peace without chaos, fulfillment without want, warmth without cold, life without death, joy without suffering.

One day, half a dozen medical specialists and a cool ten grand down the road from now, some brainiac will get lucky and correctly guess the cause of this mystery pain. A treatment will come, something that makes me feel seventy-two percent better, and it will feel to me like heaven. Perhaps when that day comes, I will pause long enough to appreciate what brought me there.