Wisdom in Pain

Small tribute to my wife for showing me the beauty of pain's fire. On January 8th, 2008 she faced pain's ugly face and fought back with vengeance. For months I heard people tell her that she was "crazy" for wanting to have natural child birth. "Why would you want to do that?" people would ask her, and her only response time after time was, "I want the experience." She didn't want to robe herself of an experience she knew her body was built for. I wasn't any help. She fought the fight alone. I might have been standing there by her side, but she suffered alone. After months of preparation her mind and body where ready for the experience. I will never feel what she felt, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from watching. I like what OTP said when talking about doing hard things, "You have to become familiar with pain." The most memorable experience of my wife giving birth to our daughter came about two hours into the experience. She was right in the middle of the worst contractions. The head nurse came over and put her hand on my wife's shoulder and said, "It's not to late to get an epidural." With a piercing stair my wife just kept on breathing and fighting. There is always an easy way out, and more often then not it is my mind that tells me to stop the fight. That is when I must learn to fight back - to hold on, and keep pushing.

20 Min of AMRAP of:

5 Pullups + 10 Pushups + 15 Squats

"Wisdom in pain.— There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species. If pain did not, it would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it but its essence. In pain I hear the captain’s command: “Take in the sails!” The bold seafarer “man” must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, and the ocean would swallow him. We must learn to live with diminished energies, too: As soon as pain gives its safety signal the time has come to diminish them; some great danger or other, a storm is approaching, and we are well advised to “inflate” ourselves as little as possible.
True, there are people who hear precisely the opposite command when great pain approaches: Their expression is never prouder, more warlike, and happier than it is when a storm comes up; indeed, pain itself gives them their greatest moments. This is the heroic type, the great pain bringers of humanity, those few or rare human beings who need the very same apology that pain itself needs—and truly, one should not deny it to them. They contribute immensely to the preservation and enhancement of the species, even if it were only by opposing comfortableness and by not concealing how this sort of happiness nauseates them."

- Neitzsche