On Pain (Quotation)

"...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"