Did you ever notice how beautiful pain can be? You want to avoid it at all cost, yet you sometimes long for it without even noticing. The whole complexity of the universe and your meaningless existence within it are so terrifying that something as definitive as pain can be a welcome anchor point. Something to hold on to while shying away from it. Something you don't want but desperately need. It's one of the most fundamental forces in nature. It's what shapes intelligent life.
Pain is dangerous. Too much of it can be lethal. Yet, too little of it can be even more lethal. Pain is neither good nor evil, it's just necessary. Sometimes we accept pain in anticipation of a reward. Sometimes pain *is* the reward. Everyone inflicts pain on themselves sometimes. Everyone inflicts pain on others sometimes. Everyone allows others to inflict pain on them sometimes. it's not necessarily an unhealthy behavior. The dose is what matters. Consuming spicy food, going past your limits during sports and consuming dramatic forms of art are all ways in which pain is not only accepted but desired.
But pain doesn't need to be accepted to be beautiful. Feeling pain is one of the most profound experiences of the human condition. It's the most powerful link between mind and physical form. It encodes so much information that, if you dare to look, you can almost understand what it must be like to be your own body. If that sentence made no sense to you, you probably never dared to look.
