The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day.

Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves, what Benjamin Franklin meant:

That knowing, is better than wondering. That waking, is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.

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Pain. You just have to ride it out. Hope it goes away on its own. Hope the wound that caused it heals. There are no solutions. No easy answers. You just breathe deep and wait for it to subside.

Most of the time, pain can be managed. But sometimes, the pain gets you when you least expect it. Hits way below the belt and doesn’t let up.

Pain. You just have to fight through. Because the truth is, you can’t outrun it. And life always makes more.
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People have scars in all sorts of unexpected places. Like secret road maps of their personal histories, diagrams of all of their old wounds. Most of our old wounds heal, leaving nothing behind but a scar. But some of them, don’t.

Some wounds, we carry with us everywhere… and though the cut is long gone, the pain still lingers.

What’s worse? New wounds, which are so horribly painful, or old wounds, which should have healed years ago, and never did? Maybe our old wounds teach us something. They remind us where we’ve been, and what we’ve overcome. They teach us lessons about what to avoid in the future. That’s what we like to think.

But that’s not the way it is, is it? Some things we just have to learn over and over and over… again.