my sum total of pain
‘if i suddenly went blind, would you still look in my eyes?‘
was thinking about c s lewis on the bus going to school. he said that there is no aggregate sum of suffering. no one experiences the sum total of pain at any given moment during his/her lifetime. the sum total of 50 units of pain experienced by a 50 year old man still works out to be 1 unit of pain per year. under my current situation, i couldnt help but wonder ‘what is my sum total of pain so far?’
that’s pretty tough to estimate, since a score reflecting a degree of pain will be totally arbitrary. still though, it’d be interesting to know what the sum total would be. maybe i could start keeping score now. if i start giving score to the days i write on the this blog, and if i blog for a very long time, i could technically produce a graph charting my happy and sad days, like this:
By plotting such a graph, i could calculate the area under (or over) the curve to calculate my sum total of happiness versus pain. now that’s a pretty sad thing to do. yeah ok not gonna do it. maybe i could just have a scale of +10 (max happiness) to -10 (max pain), then add up all the numbers as time progresses. i wonder how long i can keep that up for… well anyways, today was a +3, and yesterday must’ve been a -8 or something…
I once tried to make a similar graph, it lasted me two days. I do think that it’s good to think about though. If anything just to make us thankful.
-R