It’s a Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain

PLAY quickly turns nasty sometimes. Like the time my wife was playing with our son as he ventured toward sleep. He was so tired, his little body and mind had little to resist a few gentle tickles. There was the trickle of gentle and contagious laughter. But when he had had enough, the laughter soon turned to tears. I could have almost predicted it.

There are times also where I have almost sprained my ankle, yet, in correcting the movement by instinct, I avoided injury and the pain associated with it.

It’s a fine line between good fortune and misfortune.

When we acknowledge this vital truth, seeing good fortune as a blessing and not counting misfortune too much as a curse, we begin to weigh life in balance. And life is finely balanced.

There are days when we feel all at sea, completely out of our depth, low on confidence, faking it until we get through to a private moment where we can cry out to God. There are days, also, when nothing goes wrong, and the joys come streaming in. And there are so many experiences of life between these two great emotional poles.

We make too much of the pleasure and we worry about missing out, whilst we also lament any thought of pain, even before it has arrived. But pain is inevitable, just as the pleasure is.

There’s such a fine line between laughter and tears. And when we prove emotional, we may easily vacillate between the two.

Appreciating the topsy-turvy nature of life is a blessing for the feelers of this world. The thinkers wonder what all the fuss is about. They have a steady equilibrium from an emotional sense, which appears as balance, but they may not provide the sort of emotional response some close others might expect from them. It isn’t their fault; they are who they are. The feeler is still prone to the dichotomy between laughter and tears.

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As we accept the delicate knife edge between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, and so forth, we understand life has a definite fickleness about it. This helps us achieve a thinking balance.

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There’s a fine line between laughter and tears

As we consider the regularity of joy and fears

Managing them both is what life’s all about

Acceptance truly is confidence beyond doubt.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.