Living with PAIN - or - LIVING, with pain

My night time routine is pretty solid these years. Stretches, clean my teeth with Sensodyne, toilet the dog, and then climb into bed while arranging all the pillows between my knees and other joints before adjusting the mattress firmness for my back.

I've contemplated adding some private journaling into that routine. A few minutes to capture the inputs and outputs of my day without any pressure to make jokes or Lightroom my photos. It would be a great way to solidify lessons learned, as well as inscribe some memories of days I hope to one day look back on fondly.

What prevents me from ever doing this is knowing that nearly every night I will be describing pain. Like, if today was an example, it would have gone: woke up, knee was sore. Walked the dog, then making breakfast fucked off my wrist. That's been giving me sharp pain all day, except for when I sit too long and the ache in my hamstring sometimes takes precedence. I spent most of the day writing abstract RAML type definitions and then implementing them in a second library so that they could be imported into consumer API specifications in an extendible way. After work it was cool enough to go outside without melting so I mowed the lawn and like clockwork my dog was dropping a turd on it by the time the grass catcher was back in the shed.

I accepted many years ago that I was never going to get back to a pain free baseline, and until I implant my consciousness into a shitty claw machine attached to a hoverboard that I am going to be living with pain, not tucking my shirt in, and I may never sit on a sofa again.

But there is living with pain, and there is LIVING, with pain. I am choosing the latter and while it is not June, 2008 the principle does bring me some mental stability. Which, in part, comes from physical stability. Rehab and mobility exercises would also be on my daily journals, 2-3 times a day. They don't make me invincible, but I hope that by doing them I make little tweaks like today hopefully just little. They make the bad days okay, and the really bad days just bad. I think this helps me do more living than pain.

I guess it does help knowing that if I ever get truly over it I can sell everything and go hang out in Paris for a while. I might be living with pain, but I will be LIVING. And by that I mean, spending time under trees not moving.