Running through Pain--A Paragraph a Day

 One of my New Year's resolutions is very simple:  I want to post a paragraph a day here on this blog, about things that are actually a part of my life and my living.  Sometimes the thoughts and ideas here are far too abstract, and they get a bit difficult to continue, especially after more than twenty years of keeping it up.  So here's today's paragraph:

I went running today, and things were fine for the first ten minutes or so.  Then my left calf started hurting, as in pulled-muscle type of hurting.  I stopped when it started because the pain was pretty intense, but I was already more than a mile from home, so my options were to stop and walk home, or keep going.  I decided to keep going (and please note that almost every doctor in the world would advise against doing what I did).  Why?  Because I started running again and found a stride that allowed me to run through the pain--it wasn't pain-free, but it also wasn't getting worse.  I was able to go another forty minutes before I finished, and the calf hurts now, obviously because I continued running on it.  But there are a few truths that I've learned throughout life that allow me to keep running.  First, some things are going to hurt.  A run, a relationship, a heart.  Once we accept that there will be pain in life, pain doesn't have the strength it does otherwise.  Second, continuing on even though it's painful is a valuable trait to pursue in life.  We don't want to be stupid about it and hurt ourselves more--if it had been a different kind of pain or more severe, I definitely would have stopped and walked home.  But again, once we accept that there will be pain, pain means something else when it shows up.  Third, though I hurt now, I know something important:  I would be hurting now even if I had stopped and walked home.  The pain is there, and it would have been in any case.  Sometimes the best thing we can do is not let a bit of pain stop us, but to run through it and keep doing what we're doing, even if it hurts.  We will hurt.  The question is whether or not we allow that hurt to determine who we are and what we do.