“Life is pain, princess!”

The words, “Life is pain, princess!” echo in my mind these days. Some ‘farmboy’ (Walter? Westley?) says it to his love, the princess, in the movie “The Princess Bride”. (If I’m to write, I don’t have time to look for names and facts, I simply must just keep going). I keep thinking about these words, “Life is pain, princess”. They come for me, my obsessive mind. They sneak up on me in a hot shower, where I feel, for 5 minutes, without the earthly aches and pains of being a human. They meet me around the corner, in the bend around the park when I’ve walked too far, ambitiously, thinking I’m like everyone else, and can keep going. They startle me when a friend calls with bad news. They echo in the recesses of my ear’s chamber, when I accidentally hurt my own feelings thinking about something in the past.

“Life is pain, princess”, Westley, having just undergone the loss of an unforgivable number of years of his life on this torture device, says to his love. Admirably, his stoic character endures this loss of life, as just another part of life. We encounter the same at every intersection we never expected to find ourselves in, yet we are caught red-handed standing there looking into the eyes of the sun, asking how me, why us, why now, why him, how come her, can it be reversed, where is the why, tell me why, why, why.

I suppose nothing can prepare us for it. Try as we might to gaze into the unknowing abyss of the sea and imagine what dragons are lurking there, we still cannot know what monsters may emerge from Marianna’s trench. All this to say, nothing can prepare or protect you from pain, it just is. Pain just is. It will always be there, life, while miraculously stunningly beautiful, is pain.