brain power – Mind Journeys

This Painful Life

Every minute of every day, I experience pain. People say how hard it must be, and I don’t disagree. It just is. I have experienced pain since my late teens. I recently turned 63, and the pain has really been both continuous and severe for the past 20 years.

There are days when I complain about it. Not so much the pain as the extra limits it places on my life: less mobility, so a walk on the beach turns step by step into agony. Less ability to sit, so an evening at a restaurant becomes 20 minutes before the pain just makes me, well, go home. At least in recent years, I’ve learned that I have to either pre-order, or choose a restaurant that serves me quickly.

Doctors now recognize chronic pain as a disease of the nervous system or of the brain. That’s not to say that the pain is all in the mind. Rather it points to the mis-firing of the brain’s systems for experiencing pain. In chronic pain, the nerves that bring messages of pain to the brain and the systems that interpret sensations and the brain’s own map of the body are all out of whack, like an orchestra playing out of tune and out of time.

In my case, it’s as though the brain is replaying pain from previous injury to my spine. Ghost pain messages play havoc in my brain. For other people, the ongoing pain may not relate to tissue damage at all, but it arises, a mystery with no obvious cause.

On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is no pain and 10 the worst pain imaginable, my pain sits uncomfortably around 7 most of the time. Others with chronic pain have more fluctuation.

Pain is one thing. The experience of suffering is another. Both pain and suffering are mysterious experiences. But the extent to which a person suffers from their pain is partly a choice.

Rae Scott's cover "The Secret of Mount Toolbrunup"

As a young man, I climbed Mount Toolbrunup. In W.A.’s Stirling Ranges, Toolbrunup’s the toughest climb, because loose scree covers its steep sides. You scrabble up two or three steps, often on hands and knees, and then slide back one or two. It’s exhausting. Even though you seem to make no progress, the skinned knees and knuckles don’t make you suffer. You are climbing. An interesting activity engages you, and if you lift your head high enough, you see better and better views.

Climbing Mount Toolbrunup is a bit like living with chronic pain. You scrabble along. Your way is exhausting and the pain is real. But you are engaged in something other than the effort to move along: the fascinating activity of life. If you lift your attention away from the pain, you see how absolutely captivating life is. You see people to love, usually those who love you. You see an extraordinary world full of natural and man-made marvels; planets and meerkats and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. You choose interesting activities, reading, watching movies and setting crossword puzzles are some I choose. Life is there to be lived.

Or you can choose to suffer. Chronic pain is different from many illnesses. If you break a leg, it gets better. If you have diabetes, you can take insulin. There are pain pills, but they don’t always work. Meditation and exercise form the best base treatment for chronic pain, but note: you have to work at them. You have to choose.

The pain is unrelenting. I have many strategies to keep me sane, even cheerful. I don’t underestimate the climb. Researchers have found, for example, that chronic pain is experienced in the same region of the brain as depression. For many people ongoing pain and deep depression go hand in hand. It’s easy to slip into the chasm of depression, and I have once or twice.

But in the end, I choose. I choose to minimise the pain and limitations, and as well as I can, I choose not to suffer. The view’s great.

Sheep and Eternal Life

Like King David in the Old Testament, I grew up among sheep. The biggest difference was that where David’s sheep numbered in the dozens, our flocks were in the thousands. One of my earliest lessons about sheep was not to be concerned about individuals.

Dad forbade us to keep sheep as pets, knowing the heart-ache that came when a pet was killed for meat. I noticed too the seeming indifference to a sick sheep. If a sheep was suffering, it may have been simply killed, but in general, sick sheep were left to get better on their own – or not. The only exception to this was revealing: if a ewe was having trouble lambing, Dad would sit beside it, all night if necessary, and be midwife in every possible way.

Dad wasn’t a callous man. He was gentle and generous in character. His was the most humane way of keeping the flock healthy. The sheep’s purpose was to feed people, not to be our friends. But Dad’s emphasis on the flock was instructive.

I looked to nature. I loved watching ants go about their busy lives. I noticed that ants had wonderful powers of restoring their apparently dead companions. They would push them gently with one of their six legs, and the motionless ant would pick up its load and continue walking. But they simply walked around ants that were dead or too sick to recover.

I confess as a boy I sometimes stirred up their nests. They would rise up in anger, climbing my legs and stinging all the way. Ants from other nests would come to join their attack on the intruder. They did not care how many I slapped to death on my legs: their task was to defend the queen and her nest, and even their neighbours’ nest.

My studies at school and since have confirmed that in nature survival of a species is paramount over that of individuals. The health, comfort and life of an individual simply do not stand up against the powerful drive for the species to survive.

Nature is species-centred. Most animals seem to accept this reality. It is only humans, fired on by two important events in our history, who think differently and therefore unnaturally.

The first event was when human beings became self-conscious. Because we know we are alive as individuals, we can choose to protect our own life at the expense of others. It is notable, however, that in dangerous situations, people don’t always choose their own life over that of others. We hear often of people who choose to sacrifice their own safety to protect others, particularly women and children, who are the future of the species. They act naturally.

The second event was the European Enlightenment which encouraged us to think very highly of individuals. The Enlightenment accorded to individuals human rights. The Enlightenment encouraged individuals to greater self-expression.

Could it not be that the Enlightenment project is against nature?

It is natural to think not of the individual but of the species. It is natural for people to be stirred up about the damaging effects of climate change: our species is at risk. The plight of low-lying island nations like Kirabiti and the Maldives stirs deep emotions. We don’t want human habitat to be wiped out.

To think that God’s imagination can provide nothing better than the survival of individuals after death is to think poorly of God. God’s mind is on the main game, which is played by species not their individual members.

This is why I find the usual ideas about life after death lame in comparison with the glorious visions of future humanity put forward by say, Teilhard de Chardin and Ilia Delio. As individuals we are secure in Christ. But as a species, how much more secure is our life.

Teilhard’s vision was that homo sapiens continues to evolve. We have come to self-consciousness and are moving towards a complete humanity in Christ. Jesus, the true human is coming to his Omega Point, where humanity converges with God. We will be raised up into the One who has made us.

Ilia’s focus, it seems to me, is on a slightly closer time. What is the next step of this evolutionary journey? How close will humanity come to its machines? Will brains be uploaded into computers? Will human beings extend their thinking power through new digital media? Is our destiny – short-term – to be cyborgs?

In the broader vision, I suspect the speculations of Ilia and others will be swept aside by an even grander picture of what homo sapiens will become, and will have more to do with what happens as the individual is transcended and we each become part of a greater whole. Again, the technological revolution gives us the clue, as the Web becomes more and more an extension of individual minds into the minds of others.

It is true that there are dangers. Monsters may be born. But the teaching of evolution is that that which is best suited to its environment will flourish, and homo sapiens will become more a creature of the cosmos rather than less.

These are extraordinary and beautiful visions of our future life. Bring it on!

The Glory of God is people fully alive

“Hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in the process, or in other words, an adventure going forward.”

Yesterday I discussed with my doctor changing the frequency of one of my medications. This involved charting my reactions to the drug, a discussion with the doctor, who telephoned the specialist after appointment. Later in the day, the doctor rang me back with the conclusions of his discussion with the specialist. I had to explain all this to my wife when she came home from work. Today, I must collect a new prescription from the doctor’s surgery and take it to the pharmacist and discuss it with him.

Chronic illness is like that. It is so easy for the illness to become that the main preoccupation of my thinking, and relations with others.

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel writes, “Thus there is a risk that illness will make of me that deformed creature, a catalogued and professionalised invalid, who thinks of himself as such and contracts in all respects, the habitus of illness. … In so far as I hope, I detach myself from this inner determinism.”

Living well with chronic illness requires making a fundamental choice about who I am. I can choose to be a person with chronic pain, a sick person, a “catalogued and professionalised invalid.” Alternatively, I can choose to be a full human being, not defined by my illness, or any other single characteristic, but seeking a balanced and rich life.

This choice must be made every day. I learn how to live well with my illness from my experience as a Christian disciple. The framework of my life includes the habit of Morning Prayer. Every morning I need to be reminded that “new every morning is the love”

whose energy permeates my life. Every morning, I need to be reminded to choose God, to choose life rather than death, to choose to walk a creative path rather than to crawl in sin.

Every morning, I make the choice anew to live in the moment. How destructive it is to dwell in the past, or to worry in the future. “Hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in the process, or in other words, an adventure going forward.” (Marcel again.)

This way of life is both practical and profoundly spiritual because it is both a more enjoyable and more integrated way for the mind/body/spirit to live.

The second century theologian Irenaeus saw the vision of the glory of God as people really alive (Gloria Dei vivens homo). Living with chronic pain need not reflect a disappointment with the Creator, making a mess of his creation. Living with chronic pain, when the creative path of living fully in the present moment is chosen, can truly glorify God.

Use your brain

Pain clinics usually have psychologists. That’s not because chronic pain is a mental illness, but because the mind has resources that can help us change the way we look at our pain. Pain psychologists are more like sports psychologists than ordinary psychologists. They are basically interested in getting us to perform better.

There are parallels between elite athletes and people with chronic pain. The most obvious is the necessity for exercise. To manage chronic pain we must be in training always. The type of exercise may vary depending on your level of disability, but I must have significant exercise every day to give the cardio-vascular system a work out.

At the moment, that means I start my walk with the ritual of calling the dog, getting her to sit and attaching her lead. Then we walk for 10-15 minutes. My next goal is to take a slightly different route that will add 5 minutes to my walk and conclude with a significant climb.

When summer comes, I take to the swimming pool and do ‘water-running’ and gradually build up my times and my effort. I’m currently on 4 x 50 metre laps, at just over 4 minutes a lap. My pulse and breathing rates get to near my safe limit, so I will continue doing 4 laps until my vital rates are lower. Then I will add a half-lap, and then another.

To do this properly requires a bit of obsession. I have to be disciplined like an athlete preparing for a big meet. To keep on track, I have to use my brain, and not only for exercise. Like an athlete, I use my brain to reframe and refine my attitudes. For example, the attitude that the world owes me is not a helpful attitude for an athlete or a person with long-term pain. My attitude needs to be not that I am owed anything, but that I have something to give, and I have the capacity to achieve.

Near the town where I live is a walking trail called The Bibbulmun Track. Named after the local aboriginal clan, the trail winds its way through most of the traditional Bibbulman lands. Walkers take up to 6 weeks to trek the length of the trail through jarrah and karri forests and coastland heath. From September to November, the wildflowers fill the bush with colour. The cool mornings of winter bring a crisp mist to the karri forests. I think it is the most beautiful country on earth.

For some time, I have not been able to walk on the Bibbulman track. It’s not that I want to walk from one end to the other. I would just like to be able to drive to a place where the trail intersects the highway and walk for three hours or so.

I am not physically able to manage that walk at present, but I use my brain to motivate my body to heal. I hold it up to myself as a goal. I set myself this goal as a participant in the Pain Understanding and Management Program at our local hospital. Now many months later, I am not much closer to my goal. But having the goal has kept me walking every day. Having the goal has increased my appreciation of our own native garden.

My brain can heal my body, and I like getting the most out of it.