# Chapter 49

Working through pain. Its been a fairly shitty summer, which is generally my favorite time of the year. I like summer best for two reasons, its warm and occasionally hot which I like just fine, and its when I can exercise and be outside the most. This summer, not so much. A blown knee put me in a chair for over six weeks and has left me with a long rehab. Just when I was making some good progress with that rehab, my back goes out and I am once again confined to little movement. All these beautiful warm days passing me by and winter is coming!

But the pain is the more minute by minute distressor and disruptor. It is what will keep you from producing your best work and accomplishing all your required tasks. Pain is way more insistent than are noisy distractions, that I wrote about yesterday. Pain intrudes. You can’t just mentally box it up and ignore it, like I am currently doing to the tv blaring across the room. This is inside you and constant and stabbing and poking and generally unignorable. Finding a way to snatch moments of clarity and focus are the challenge here. This all with the understanding that pain is a sliding scale and that there is manageable pain and unbearable pain. Of course we are discussing manageable pain - unbearable pain requires morphine and a good last will and testament.

Manageable pain still sucks all the air out a room and takes away all your focus and concentration. And how you get that back is the point here. You do it one word at a time, one idea at a time, slowly building what may have happened much more quickly in a painfree world, but you can still do this. I know you can.