A Treatise on Pain

This astonishingly insightful thesis is quite possibly my magnum opus. By that I don’t mean the crime drama that our dads used to watch, or the ice cream brand that has a great vegan almond flavour, but my life’s greatest work, my masterpiece, my piece de resistance, chef d’ouvre and midlife swansong. 

(As you can tell, my fondest memory of the many childhood hours spent browsing the Oxford English Dictionary is of looking up the meaning of a word, and finding a definition made up of three more words I had to look up. But I digress.)

Have you ever wondered about a particular aspect of the nature of pain? That one kind of pain hides another? 

This idea is best illustrated with a painfully realistic example, pun intended. Let’s say you’ve been hiking for a really, really long time, and your feet have begun to hurt. But you’re stubborn and you forge on, and then after a while you notice that your hip has begun to throb. Your aching feet are all forgotten, but does that mean that your pain has somehow transferred from your feet to your hip, and that you feet are all fine now? NO!

If you stop and turn the gaze of your mind’s eye upon your feet, you will realize that they have been hurting all along, and that your brain has just shifted attention to the newest, shiniest ache on the block. Let me pause now and name this phenomenon, because naming things is traditionally how one fools oneself into thinking one understands something.

I call it the Acupuncture Principle. It has absolutely nothing to do with chi or meridians, but merely derives from my belief that the only possible way acupuncture could work is if the act of inserting needles into various parts of your body distracts, terrifies and annoys you to the point that you forget all about your chronic back pain.  Like with feet and hips. 

Now that we’ve nomenclatured our way to enlightenment, the other interesting thing about the Acupuncture Principle is that not being able to multitask isn’t a bad thing right? Imagine being able to feel every kind of pain equally, all at once. The horror. One might even consider striking ‘multi-tasking’ off one’s CV.

OK, so you’re a masochist and you ignore your throbbing hip and your stabbing feet and decide to soldier on. Now your shoulders are on fire, your back is creaking and muscles you didn’t know you had are crying for you to stop. That is when you will have another epiphany. 

Pain is actually just like a broken up former empire with too many squabbling city-states, all ruled by despotic warlords. You just want them to change over frequently just so one of them doesn’t rise up and conquer the whole world.

But like with real life squabbling city-states and fallen empires, an Alexander the Great will eventually rise up and take over. What starts off as insignificant skirmish in the netherworld of the realm of the feet, ignored by the mighty twin kings of the deltoids of the North, and the valley of the Spine, spreads upwards and outwards, slowly and inexorably until the whole world is in thrall of the Pedestrian Emperor of agony, and all that remains is a nostalgia for the halcyon days of squabbling city-states and brutal civil wars.

And when the humble backwoods tribe of the Wrist joins the cacophony of torment, it’s akin to a nation of weed smokers rising up in rebellion against The Man - a laughably pointless gesture that you’d get behind as an absolute last resort. You only pause for a moment before conceding that the tyranny of the Pedestrian Emperor qualifies, and you focus the full force of the Acupuncture Principle on the Wrist. And when your hip begins to throb again, you actually feel better because not only is the hegemony of the foot defeated, but because you’re vindicated.

And so the first chapter of my magnum opus is written.