The Tribune

DURING a month filled with celebrations, it’s easy to forget about those who are just trying to get through another day. The excitement they feel around them may make it harder to endure what they are facing. Maybe it deepens the divide between where they are emotionally or physically and where they think others are, making them feel even more alone and farther apart from the land of those planning barbeques and fireworks, backyard parties, official flag-raising and parades.

This is not intended to come across as a dose of downer throwing buckets of water on your parade but to jar all of us into remembering that around the world and right here at home, there are countless men, women and children fighting for their lives while we are grilling chicken.

Sad, sure. But there is good news and there are a few suggestions.

First, the good news. They say that the thing about pain that makes it bearable is that once it passes, you cannot re-live it. You can recall having it. You can remember feeling terrible, screaming, crying or wanting to cry. You can almost grab hold of what you felt, but not exactly, like seeing a cloud, but not being able to hold it. You can count the minutes the pain endured, but not re-live them.

Thanks to amazing things our mind does to protect us, you cannot recapture pain in its entirety.

Science has a fairly simple explanation for this. The brain has evolved in such a way that it does not have the necessary receptors to feel the pain. When hurtful stimuli impact these receptors, called nociceptors, elsewhere in the body, the brain sends signals to the thalamus which sends to the cortex and limbic system, as if instructing them to interpret what happened and make sense of it. In short, rather than feeling the pain itself, the brain serves to send a warning signal not to put your hand on a hot stove again because it caused a painful reaction in your body.

Another way to look at it in layman’s terms when trying to understand how pain and brain interact is like this. More than a container holding the pain, the brain becomes the clearinghouse sorting out the cause of the hurtful sensation, driving the intelligence behind avoiding the cause of acute pain. If the pain is chronic, the nerves and brain have to work harder together.

If you have any doubts about inability to re-live pain, just ask any woman who has given birth about what she endured during labour. No matter how excruciating it was, or how many hours it lasted, she is protected from re-experiencing what she went through. Knowing she hurt may be seared in her memory but she will never be able to re-live what she felt which is a mighty good thing for the future of the universe.

But let’s be honest. Most of what we have to talk about when it comes to pain is not a good thing and there is no better time to help others overcome what they are enduring or ease their suffering when it is most pronounced around holidays which is what inspired this column today. No month other than December is more packed with the shout-out-loud party holidays than the month that begins tomorrow, July 1, with Canada Day, followed by July 4, American Independence. July 10 is our 50th anniversary of Independence. July 14 is Bastille Day, marking French Independence. July 18 marks Nelson Mandela International Day.

So as you plan to join the People’s Rush or the Ecumenical Service or the celebration at Clifford Park on the days leading up and including July 10, please let the anniversary of Bahamian Independence take on a special personal meaning by sharing love with someone who is hurting. Visit a senior, take clothes to a children’s home, carry home-baked goods or mac ’n cheese to a place where you know there is hunger.

Together, we can make our independence count. Together, through kindness in easing another’s pain, we can show the world what a true-true Bahamian is.

Remember that someone is holding the hand of a loved one in the hospital while you are grilling chicken.