On Saturday evening I heard a strange chorus. First it sounded like…moaning. Then a kind of panting. A little bit of “mmmm,” and then a “haaaaa” that rose and peaked before waning into an “ooooooo.”
It kept going like that as I casually continued to try and locate the source. Was I hearing things? At first I thought I was. And then no, I was sure that I wasn’t. Because it kept coming, louder or softer, but steady. It sounded exactly like sex. But I was at work! Sitting in the middle of a nurse’s station!
It took another long moment before I realized: what I was hearing was pain.
Fascinating, I thought, that a peak of pleasure sounds identical to a depth of despair.
And then I remembered a moment during my first pregnancy. I was at a bachelorette weekend with girlfriends, sitting around an outdoor table, when someone said something so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing. It went on and on, until I was guffawing, rolling, crying with laughter.
And then I felt a shift. The emotion rolled over, and suddenly I was all-out sobbing, for absolutely no conscious reason. For a solid 120 seconds I bawled like a baby—chest-heaving, eye-squinting, BAWLING.
And then it passed. Just like that, the sky cleared and I could breathe again.
It happened to me one other time several years after that—laughing so hard I sobbed—and I still can’t figure it out. It’s like the my neurons somehow get crossed, and whatever part of my brain interprets emotions gets a little hijacked, so things come out flop-flipped.
I find myself thinking about this more and more often lately. What these experiences have in common—joy & despair, pleasure & pain—is an intensity of FEELING. We tend to consider them as opposites, perhaps even antagonistic to one another. But in reality they’re two sides of the same coin.
In fact, I think FEELING is the whole point.
FEELING is the measure of being alive.
What then are we choosing if we seek to escape pain and despair?
I think we are choosing a death.