askchapo

It doesn't solve the pain, but I do try to think of Montaigne when I'm in a situation like this. Of course he's talking about kidney stones and the instant relief (something unfortunately back pain doesn't usually have), but the shift from pain to not pain is amazing. The morning you wake up and slept right and no longer hurt is 10/10.

But is there anything delightful in comparison of this sudden change, when from an excessive pain, I come, by the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and full, as it happens in our sudden and sharpest colics? Is there anything in the pain suffered, that one can counterpoise to the pleasure of so sudden an amendment? O, how much does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another, in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head against and dispute it with one another! As the Stoics say that vices are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can, with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has given us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and indolence. When Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow and mutually beget one another; and cried out to good fellow Aesop, that he ought out of this consideration, to have taken matter for a fine fable.

Obviously pain isn't good on its own, and get yourself some Tylenol and if it persists see a doctor. But allowing yourself to feel through it and then, on the other side, appreciate feeling good even more is I think a good attitude when it's just the flesh being... Bleh.

As I get older "On Experience" continues to hit harder and harder.