The weird thing is the bulk of our time spent “in a painful experience” is willing participation. The anatomy of a painful experience is stimuli & response. The

The weird thing is the bulk of our time spent “in a painful experience” is willing participation. The anatomy of a painful experience is stimuli & response. The stimuli are (generally speaking) pretty brief, but you have no say in them. The response is the part where I have wallowed in self pity for months, have screamed myself hoarse into the void, etc. Recently, sometimes I can’t help but see an optional epicycle wrapped around the whole experience like “ah, pain again. okay, let’s get this over with and get back to what I care about.”