Blog 3624 – 10.05.2025

Headaches and Heartaches

The subject of today’s blog is two of the places most of us feel pain from time to time. Countless pills are sold over the counter and by doctor’s prescriptions to help ease these pains. Pain relief is big business, both legal and illegal. But we might consider instead of masking the pain to look for its root cause and eliminate or treat that rather than dealing with just the symptoms. Headaches and headaches are warning signs of some underlying problem or problems that need to be addressed.

There is a line in one of my all time favorite and most watched movies, An Unfinished Life, where Mitch played by Morgan Freeman who was mauled by a bear lives with constant pain for which he has been prescribed morphine to be administered by injection as needed. His long-time friend Einar played by Robert Redford gives him an injection every morning and sometimes more than once’s throughout the day. Einar asks Mitch, “How is the pain this morning?” To which Mitch responds, “It gets my full attention?

That is the purpose of pain – to get our full attention so we will deal with it. Besides the preferred methods of many, if not most, people to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, some have found ways to distract themselves from their own pain by meditation or better still actively trying to find ways to use their own chronic pain to make them more sensitive to the pain and to try to ease the pain of others.

Sixty years ago when I was fifteen going on sixteen I was still suffering from my first big heartache and wrote a poem called The Purpose of Pain. Even after all these years I still recall those profound words:

The Purpose Of Pain

by David J. White

The purpose of pain as I see it

All toll of one heart torn

Is to make the heart so tender

Each dying rose to mourn.

If you can ease the pain of headaches and heartaches by any and all means, do, but while the pain gets your full attention remember also to look for the root cause of your pain and try to remove or treat that, but also to use the experience of pain to remind you that others are hurting too and just might need a helping hand, an understanding head, and a caring heart to help deal with their pain.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b1QAEO6OQfJ7YtgFQKjHIQCijkJCVTr/view?usp=drivesdk

A Fire I Can’t Out Out