Pain.

Over the past few weeks I have had various bumps and bruises, hurt my back, pulled a muscle or two in my leg and last night was kept awake in agonizing pain by an attack of gout in my left ankle. This is all not a big deal, random things don't happen in orderly ways, they come along in little packs, or not at all, or sometimes just one out of the blue. I don't feel cursed and my attitude is pretty positive.
Pain is an interesting thing, a very difficult thing to describe because it is entirely subjective. I have noticed what it does psychologically when literally the primary thought at all times is the experience of pain. It dulls everything else, as if there is a finite amount of processing power in your head. After a while I find that a big problem is the boredom of constant pain, it is amazing to me how much difference reading a decent book can make to the sensation of discomfort. For some reason I am reluctant to take drugs to kill pain, while I have little problem with drugs for almost any other reason. There's a part of me that really wants to be aware of what in my body is not workin.
The other thing with pain is the limitations to one's activities. This may be as bad as the basic sensation. The driving force in my personality, the area that has the greatest effect on my happiness or misery is the amount of freedom I have. If I can do what I want to do, I will be happy. In my life I have found this to be a surprisingly unusual quality. I tell my lovely wife that the number one reason I love her is because if she says she wants something, and she gets it, she is then happy as a result. But with a swollen ankle that sends stabbing knives into my flesh with every step, there's not much I can do. I can't walk to the park, I can't drive a car, I can't walk upstairs. However, I can practice the mandolin, and as a result I'm improving more rapidly this last couple of weeks than at ay time before.