"...and, twenty-five years later, I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain of course, but the pain is what I thought of as the edge of a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can't even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing that I [learned] was that when you start hurting you're not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don't panic at the first agonies there's much, much more of yourself to give."
- Sebastian Junger
"War"
3 comments:
Sometimes you make me feel guilty for not suffering. :)
I just tore through this book in three days. Amazing book. Good quote.
I never ever thrive unless the heat/pain is on. Take now for example. I have done more in the last 5 days, productive meaningful stuff, than I have in the last month. Writers block vanished. Training like a madman. Why? The chance of it all ending is hear. This always, without exception brings out the best in me. The struggle.
Pain is just the beginning.
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