S*** Happens.

Today is March 20. Five years ago on this date, one of my best friends from high school killed herself.

Today, on March 20, across the world thousands of people are dead, dying, and/or dealing with the death of their worlds in Japan, Libya, and all of those places where what I would consider unimaginable is in fact commonplace.

Intellectually, the human condition is fascinating to me. The urge to survive is perhaps the most primal instinct we have, but we are creatures of emotional and psychological as well as biological drives. Everyone has a breaking point, a moment where we simply cannot take any more—any more sadness, any more struggle, any more adversity, any more pain. There are as many ways to deal with that breaking point as there are causes for it. Finding a higher plane within yourself so that your consciousness can rise above and allow you to carry on in a rational, fairly emotionally healthy life. On the opposite end, “shutting off” everything but the will to persevere and survive and simply keep going, one foot in front of the other, until a resolution of some sort appears or is made. Or the choice is made to stop going. To let that point break you.

How is one path the answer for one person, and another the answer for their neighbor? What makes one person with ostensibly the best-case scenario in terms of haves vs have-nots choose the last path I mentioned? And what makes a person with no home, health, or hope for the future able to keep going? Certainly there are tangible factors; religion, cultural experience and expectations, and mental health come to mind. But in the end, it is a mystery. I don’t care to explore it much, intellectually or emotionally. I believe that we can never truly know a person, or understand their perspective. At work we just did a quick online class about pain management. The feeling of pain, the class said, is something only the patient can know. As practitioners, we need to respect the patients’ experience of pain, even if they are smiling as they tell you they are in agony, because they, and only they, can be the experts on their pain. We cannot judge their pain, and as hard as it is, especially for me, we can’t ever judge people for what path they choose to take when their pain overwhelms them.

I hold no illusions that this blog is “going to change the world” or that the few people who read it want to hear my deepest metaphysical thoughts, so I won’t go on too long. I know I touch on some heavy things with my thoughts on work, but I tend to approach it through humor more than anything else. We need to laugh. But there are some things that aren’t funny. An earthquake and tsunami are not funny. Suicide is not funny. It hurts my heart to hear of all the suffering occurring every moment all over the globe. And I wish every day that my friend had not found her breaking point. I loved her, and I miss her. And without going too much into cheesiness, I can only hope for less pain for everyone out there, no matter how they define it.

Happier thoughts tomorrow, pinkie swear ☺.