The world changes when you're in pain. Different things matter. You don't have any mental energy to waste on superficiality. Voices that annoy you when you're lounging on the sofa in your air-conditioned condo have no negative effect on you when your guts are exploding with white hot torment. Faces you would normally consider unattractive are no longer characterized solely by their visual format when your own face is streaming with tears. Distinctions between ugly and beautiful are neutralized in a fiercely deep awareness that appearance is not the crucial issue in life. Substance is what counts. External details fade.
When you're lying in the ditch naked and beaten half to death, you don't even notice if the guy who kneels by your side and lifts you to safety happens to be your least favorite person in the world. You only know that you are grateful to him, whoever he is. Pain, then, although dimming many of the standard powers of perception, has the ability to open in your soul a clearer set of eyes. For a moment you glimpse a world uncolored by your personal prejudices. Pain proves to you that the world doesn't have to be nice to you; but some times it is anyway, and when that happens the only correct response is gratitude. So in the end, pain does more than hurt. Pain heals.
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