Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Anthony Bourdain On Pain

Anthony Bourdain On Pain

This passage by Anthony Bourdain on pain and loneliness haunts me.

Goodness, if you struggle with mental illness, get help. If you are confused about life, get your why down.

Everything you do matters.

For life has significant meaning and purpose.

I wish Bourdain had read: Why Suffering.

Man’s Search For Meaning is a great read too.

Just before I clicked publish on this post, I found this in my archive: This Is The Most Fundamental Philosophical Question.

Ouch.

Bourdain ended his own life seven years after this passage was published.

The happy ending? Balloons from all over Paris converge. The boy gathers them together and is lifted aloft. He drifts away, dangerously suspended over the city. The end. Where’s the kid going? To an unspecified “better” place—for sure. Or to a fatal drop when the balloons empty of their helium (as we’ve seen them do just previously). The message? Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.
…
Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog.

-Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

Fear Of Pain

Fear Of Pain

Maybe out of a fear of pain we change ourselves.

Do you think?

Maybe that’s not a bad thing though?

It could be a refocusing of out attention, if you will.

Youth show less fears, out of inexperience. But perhaps as the years go by we simply care a little less about many physical feats.

Perhaps we should remember: To stay physical is to stay young.

And, of course, all the implications around pain (and suffering) are a much larger issue.

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teen-aged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels—and I do—why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child? We could all be aerialists like squirrels, divers like seals; we could be purely patient, perfectly fleet, walking on our hands even, if our living or stature required it. We can’t even sit straight, or support our weary heads.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Sterling Terrell