Life often throws a curveball when we least expect it. While we can’t control every external event or stroke of bad luck, we can control how long we let that discomfort linger. What changes if we start distinguishing between unavoidable pain and the self-inflicted stress of dwelling on it?

Imagine taking a nice walk on a hill, the weather's great, the sun is shining. Suddenly you're struck with bird poo on your shoulder. What a shitty day. The stain on your shirt draws your complete attention that you fail to notice the second "delivery" on your way from the birds on the tree you walked under.

You couldn't have avoided the first strike, birds' bowels are beyond our control, but if you just looked up you could have dodged the second one. The original story used arrows instead of feces, but I think it sends the same message with significantly less violence - pain is unavoidable, suffering is not.

Pain is not our fault

Pain is the unexpected curveballs life gives us, the unfortunate events we all dread. There's little we can do about it - we don't control our bosses, our genes, our community, and pure random chance. Maybe life's going great, I sure hope so, but at some point we will get hit, we just have to accept that we don't have the power to prevent every bad outcome in life.

What we do to ourselves

Suffering on the other hand is self-inflicted, it's when we linger on the pain, obsess over it, prolong it. We ruminate over what happened, blaming ourselves, blaming the world, pushing people away, or becoming our worst enemy.

We think "why did this happen to me", and turn the hurtful event in the past to a continuous state in the present. The pain can't pass because we don't let it. We relive it every second we think about it. We don't just remember our mistakes or our misfortune, we become it, it defines us. As the Stoics have said - "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." Our judgment creates the suffering.

How to move forward

The only way to stop the suffering is to change our perspective from past-oriented to future-oriented. To shift from "why me" to "what can I do now?" It's easier said than done, but until we stop feeding our pain with our attention, it won't go away. It's not about ignoring it, it's about acknowledging it and moving on.

We can't erase what happened, it's not within our control, but our next action is.

What we do now is up to us, our next step is up to us. So how can we take a step forward?

1. "just five minutes" - Give yourself full permission to dwell on the pain, but only for a few minutes
2. "say it out loud" - You don't have to be ashamed of your pain. Say out loud that you've been hurt, frustrated, afraid.
3. "be your friend" - Talk to yourself like you would have talked to a friend, with compassion, yet with distance and clarity.

Ask yourself:

1. Am I adding unnecessary layers of suffering to this situation?
2. How much of my current stress is coming from the event itself versus my thoughts about it?
3. If I stop dwelling on this right now, what's the worst thing that will happen?