“Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.” -Rumi.

When we were little, pain was as simple as a skinned knee or a vaccination at the annual doctor’s check-up.

Pain was occasionally stomping our feet because we weren’t allowed to have any more candy. It was having to share our coloring books or our dollhouses, or getting in a fight on the playground over whose turn it was to use the swing.

Pain was simple. It was brief. In most cases, it was skin-deep.

We grow up and pain gets progressively more complex. We learn our strengths and thus our zeniths, and we learn our weaknesses and thus our nadirs.

It is a solitary voyage through the rosebud garden that is our youth; the flowers are only just beginning to blossom, but so too are the thorns. As we age, the kind of pain we experience deepens and widens and unfurls inside of us like the petals of those rosebuds. Pain is no longer simple, linear, or answered with some Neosporin and a bandaid. It becomes…well, thorny.

But the complexity of our pain should not prohibit us from addressing it, no matter how hard it may be to put into words. Pain is not a villainous creature sent to devour our happiness; rather, it is a reminder of the intricacy of life, and a reminder of how sweet it is to be happy.

Pain is the gnawing that crouches down somewhere deep inside you. Sometimes it is dull and throbs incessantly for days or weeks or years, and other times it is sharp, coming on hastily and leaving just as it arrived. We cannot always point a finger to our pain, because oftentimes we can’t even find it within ourselves. We just know that it’s there.

Whenever I find myself hurting in one way or another, slowly or swiftly, I am brought back here, to this cognizant place of appreciation. There is a reason for this pain. Much like the law of conservation of energy, pain cannot be created or destroyed. It migrates among us, never leaving us permanently, never fully annihilated, never created out of nothing. Pain is a part of the human experience. As inevitable as energy itself.

So perhaps we won’t start conducting daily roundtable discussions to give prominence to our pain, and perhaps we’ll still shy away from others at times when our hearts feel a bit heavier. And that’s okay.

The only person who needs to become truly aware of your pain, truly perceptive to its benefits and its paradoxical beauty, is you.