Pain

Dealing with pain was a motivation for me to do kung fu. It wasn't in the beginning. But in the first class I was stunned to see others doing (and being asked to do) pushups on their knuckles. I tried, I couldn't. My bare knuckles on the hardwood floor, the pain came immediately. Not like fire, not even like a needle. It came the moment I added any weight against the merciless floor.

I remember feeling helpless when I was going through food poisoning in January. I felt also ashamed. I thought it was something not so abnormal, even though it was my first time. And I have experienced presumably worse ordeals. But something made it horrible, and I don't know really why.

Now I still can't do a single pushup on my knuckles against the hardwood floor, but I can do a few on the mat. That's sort of cheating. Part of the reason they make us (try to) do this is when you punch someone, you don't want the pain of the knuckle to get in the way. Your hand needs to not feel pain, or at least not mind it. But more importantly, like the other endurance-trainings, I think pushups on knuckles is about the mind. In the end, it's about the mind over the body. Another torture we go through, though the pain comes ten seconds later, is the horse stand. That's what I tried to do when I was a kid watching kung fu movies. My Dad would be disappointed that I, the little boy, couldn't hold the stand for more than a few seconds. The burning pain surges from the knee up the calf like acid (well, it really is lactic acid inside). Today I could do it for a minute.

I question pain. Pain itself is a feeling. It's really the mind that decides to give up. I find myself being afraid. What if I damage my tendons when I push myself too hard on the knuckles? Same with the food poisoning; the foreign feeling of the stomach contracting suddenly, and painfully, made me very afraid. I have never felt my stomach contract so tightly. Never felt it contract, period! I had stomach aches. I had kids hit me in the stomach and I would writhe in pain. But I have never felt it like some foreign object, contracting without my permission.

So today on the bathroom floor (it's not just for my naps now), I put myself in the pushup position, on my knuckles. The pain came as quickly as before. I held myself there a few seconds longer, feeling the pain and the fear of breaking my tendons. I couldn't wonder about the pain until after I gave up. The pain was too distracting, and the fear enveloped me while I was a plank over my knuckles. Then during work (and during a meeting, slightly distracting to others) I made a fist out of each hand and starting punching the edge of a table, enough to feel the pain. My knuckles were all red, but nothing more. It's that fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing where the limit was to the force I could apply.

It's always about the mind. When I was doing the horse stand in class, I wanted to give up. But the instructor told us that it was in the mind, that we could do it more. And I did it. Longer than if I were alone. That's another reason to go to class, to be motivated, to be told I can do better.

I look at my knuckles, now, when it's all normal and happy, or after I subjected it to either the marble floor of the bathroom or the surface of oak tables, and I am reminded that I don't know my body that well, like most people don't know theirs. There are lines. There are shapes. There are different colors. And that's just the surface. What's underneath? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Again, it's that ignorance that weakens my mind. I hope after another month in kung fu I will have more confidence about what my body can do.

But the little I do know about my knuckles. They aren't like my Dad's. His are all cracked and scarred from so much manual labor since coming to this country. One time a relative, with my Mother's encouragement, made fun of my hands, saying I had women's hands because even she, a peasant, had rougher hands. I don't know pain. At least not physical pain. I can't even do a single pushup on my knuckles. That needs to change.

This is all physical pain I am talking about. The pain that most preoccupies my life is that of the heart. It's a different feeling. Heart broken. Disappointment. Hopelessness. Jealousy. The pain is unbearable in a different way. The two kinds of pain aren't comparable in quantity, but physical pain I forget much sooner, and I haven't had one of those physical injuries where I have to be in the hospital for a while with continual pain. The emotional pain is more abstract, with greater unknowns. It comes when I don't really expected as well as when I expect it. But I hope that any progress I make in enduring physical pain would spill over to the endurance of emotional pain.

Speaking of continual physical pain, one of the people I was talking to last night told me she nearly had to amputate one of her legs after a driver drove his SUV to her (hitting the gas instead of the brake, supposedly). She said she was touching her protruding broken femur. She even showed me her scar (and, strangely, asked me to touch it and touch lower part of her leg to see the difference in temperature). She's a relative beginner, six months of dancing, new to the city. Though she isn't that good, all the guys want to dance with her because she's a very pretty actress. I talked to her because I was in a mood to talk. I almost never talk at a milonga, but last night I spontaneously decided to talk, and I talked at least as much as I danced. The conversation with this actress extended beyond her broken and healed femur, though that was part of a larger topic of religion, how her Christian belief didn't make her a right-winger, despite what what left-wing people think about all religious people. I was also too tired to move my legs much. I had an hour of kung fu an hour before walking into the milonga. I also talked to this high school teacher visiting from DC, whom I danced with in that Boston tango marathon a month ago. I couldn't believe I was capable of listening so much with just seven hours of sleep total in the past two days. Last night I had less than four hours of sleep. Tonight I am looking forward to not listening to anyone and sleeping more, as Thursday nights I don't go to tango. This weekend, however, will be all tango. And we will go see the parents again, with my Dad still not really warm about talking to me.