Today's Daily Double is... the purpose of pain!

I was pondering on the purpose of pain.

There's the really obvious aspect that experiencing pain will prevent you from hurting your physical body. Such that if you did not have pain, you would be likely to accidentally close your fingers in a car door and just walk away without realizing your fingers were gone. And that would be bad and would cause infection. You wouldn't know about the infection and thus it would spread and you would some short time later die of it, and that's typically how I have heard people rationalize the reason people do and must experience pain.

But I think that there's something that is much more important and it relates to the psyche of the mind as opposed to the wellness of the body. I think that that is the only reason that people can accept death, be it their own or that of those they love, is because pain creates the potential of something far worse than death. The only thing that would make me not want to have a beloved dog live longer is seeing them suffer every day. And the only thing that would make me not want to live longer would be a debilitating pain that made being awake a type of agony that begged cessation louder than instinct begs preservation of life.

I think that the one purpose of pain surely is to keep the body intact and make sure it doesn't get too hurt, and this perhaps was the initial boon. But what makes me grateful for pain is that it can soften death's blow. That death can be not just void but also a relent and mercy.