Frame of reference

Parents say that they learn from their kids, and I'm experiencing that. An example:

My boy is four. As a four year-old, he is developing the swashbuckling habit of running in one direction, but giggling and looking in another. He's good enough at running that he takes it for granted, watching his feet pound the earth beneath him, or looking back at his pursuer for unadvisably extended periods of time. He'll learn soon enough that he'll be money ahead to monitor the immediate forward, but it's one of those things one doesn't appreciate until one experiences it for oneself.

So, he regularly crashes and burns. And when he does, he sometimes weeps like a murder victim clinging to life. As a father I hate to see him suffer, and I also recognize the human tendency to occasionally milk a mild injury beyond the pain it's likely to have caused without drawing blood.

It occurs to me that even minor spills test his known boundaries for pain. He's only been ambulatory for a couple of years now, and falling down is thankfully the major source of pain in his life. Therefore every time he eats it, as far as he's concerned it could be the worst pain he's ever felt. On his threshold of pain, skinning his knee tops the charts, tripping and smacking his head against drywall is as close to death as his frame of reference allows.

My point is that when I comfort him, I assure him that the pain will pass, and soon. It further occurs to me that it's fair advice for me as well.

I have spent hours, days, (months if you can believe it) dreading a sting that I fear will come. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. Will my wife reject me? Will my boss fire me? Will I fail to make the rent/mortgage? The time spent in a slow-motion flinch, a tensing, squinting worry that was far worse than the actual, eventual pain. A pain which, I'm happy to say, went away. Broken ankle, broken heart, broken social compact, they suck, but not nearly as bad as I thought they would, and often not as long. The pain will pass, and sooner than you think.

Once you've been kicked in the teeth a time or two, you tend to gain a steadiness from it. It's what I imagine allows boxers to do what they do. You ever been punched in the fucking face? That shit hurts, but these guys make a living getting drilled dozens of times on and about the face by somebody who's good at it. And they manage. Once you've been there and survived it, surmounted it, it still hurts, but you come away realizing it didn't kill you. You can face further blows and realize: "I've been hit harder than this."

I only recently came to understand this resilience, and I think it's a primary reason that happy people appear as buoyant as they do. They've been knocked down, but they realize that it's not likely to be the end of the world. Nobody ever gets more than one death blow, and it makes damned little sense to spend your whole life leaning away from it, especially when it's even money whether you'll see it coming anyway.