The Pain Test
The tolerance for physical pain can tell you a lot about a person. How he handles a broken arm. A bruised body. The sheer discomfort of simply holding up. Because your body revolts when it is in pain. When something is broken, it constantly reminds you that it is broken. And so you have to process all of those signals, endlessly.
The mechanism of pain is primitive. When something hurts, it reminds you that it does. It wants you to attend to it. It doesn't understand whether you are already at the hospital. Or whether you have taken the medicine. It keeps signalling the brain that something needs to be done. Which is relentless. This is the process that wears you down. Makes you brittle.
Physical pain shows on your face. The constant ache becomes physically draining too. On one hand, your brain is firing off reminders. On the other, you have to communicate your pain to people. Walk them through the whole story. How it started. What you know. What you cannot quite express. This is frustrating because maintaining your composure when your body is losing its own is an exhausting undertaking.
I respect people who can manage through physical pain. Because it means they have superior command over their body. Over their mind. They can separate the noise from the signal. They can locate the source. Identify the discomfort. And then recognise that what they are feeling is simply their body's reaction. When they speak through the pain, you can see that they have not lost their grip on their articulation.
This requires immense self-discipline. A heightened self-awareness to know that what they are feeling is temporary. That the pain was triggered. It was not always there. This act of identifying the pain, separating it from the self, and treating it while retaining their sanity is what makes them rare. This is true strength.
Most people collapse at the first sign of discomfort. Any degree of pain becomes too much for them. They demand everyone's attention and sympathy, as though it is the world's duty to absorb their suffering. They will holler, scream, rage at everything around them because they are unravelling within. Such people become a burden. You know immediately that they are unlikely to amount to much. Save for toddlers, this behaviour is indefensible.
People who carry themselves well despite having every reason to fall apart are truly worthy of respect. Physical pain is the clearest indicator of their self-control. Because it is difficult to hold your principles when your body is in revolt. That is the kind of self-control that leads to greatness in a man. And physical pain tolerance is just one way it reveals itself to the world.