I woke up yesterday in a crazy fever.  Officially queued up to be the most fun-packed weekend of the holiday season, I had to cancel everything while I dove into a painful, soaking wet alternate state for about 8 hours.  I don’t remember a lot of it.  I remember ungodly pain everywhere.  I remember going to the bathroom and whimpering on the floor trying to get back.  I remember walking the dog around the block and needing to sit down on the ground twice, wondering sincerely if I’d make it back to the door.  I remember finally sleeping and feeling peaceful and then waking up with everything on and around me as wet as if I’d been hit with a garden hose while I was sleeping.  I don’t remember much else.

But it pretty well stopped as quickly as it had come on. Just stopped. I did a load of salty laundry, washed my hair, and got some avocado toast.  Took up residence on the other side of the bed (my side is going to need to dry out for a while yet) and just am now enjoying looking out the window.

But something is different today.  Cleaned out.  Ready to go.  I don’t know what happened yesterday, but it was a kind of exorcism.  Things I cared about two days ago I don’t care about now.  They are cleared away.  Boiled off, I guess.

A big fan of moving on, I also recognize that there are experiences and understandings that you can only have when you are in them and I always hope to stay in something just long enough to get all the learnings without staying so long that things start to get stuck or fester.  In the transition out of an experience, sometimes there can be this urgency to grab the last bits of feeling or richness as it passes through your fingers.

So here is a learning that I used and am about to file, but don’t want to forget.

There are two kinds of anger and two kinds of pain:

Anger #1…is an instinct.  It’s the welling up of power we feel when we are hungry and there is food in front of us, but behind a locked gate.  It’s the anger that makes you more than human, gives you the strength and focus that might help you knock down that locked gate and generally invites you to figure out how to reshape reality beyond what seems possible.

Anger #2…is rage and it is rooted in our shame.  It’s the anger that happens when you aren’t entirely sure on some level whether the situation you are angry about doesn’t have something to do with your own insufficiency. Rage often takes the form of retributive pointing out of other people’s insufficiency, often in cruel or vengeful ways.

Pain #1…creates aversion.  I touch the fire, I get burned.  Next time I will keep a safe distance from the fire.  Unfortunately, we have such an underdeveloped relationship with the very valuable human sense of pain, that it is easy to confuse all pain as this kind of pain.  This confusion leads to small lives, squishy bodies, and incomplete hearts.

Pain #2…reconfigures.  It’s the pain of the tiny muscle tears you make every time you work out and make yourself stronger.  It’s the pain of testing and breaking down your beliefs and concepts of self.  It’s the pain of finding something lost and looking it square in the face.  It’s the pain of letting experiences change you – investing in things so beautiful that losing them might end you – and then losing them. This is the luxurious pain of being human.

Pain and anger are the fire that sometime forges us, if we can keep from using the wrong flavor at the right time.