Haruki Murakami, a Japanese author, said this in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He was writing about something as ordinary as a sore body during a long-distance race. But like all simple sentences that stay with you, it was really about something much larger — about being alive.
Pain and suffering sound like the same thing. We use them almost interchangeably. But Murakami is pointing at a gap between them — a small but life-changing gap. Pain is what happens to you. Your knee hurts. You lose someone you love. A dream falls through. The world does this to you whether you agree to it or not. It does not ask permission. It does not wait until you are ready. Pain is the tax of being human. Suffering, though, is what happens inside you, after the pain arrives. It is the story you tell yourself about the pain. It is the weight you strap onto it. It is the question you keep asking — Why me? Why now? Why this? — even though no answer is coming. Suffering is pain plus resistance. Pain plus the refusal to let things be what they are. Murakami understood that you cannot outrun pain. But you can, with great effort and honesty, choose not to drown in it.
Why he said it? Murakami came to running late in life, in his early thirties, around the same time he became a serious writer. Both demanded the same thing from him: showing up every day, doing hard work, and accepting discomfort without making it the center of everything.
When you run long distances, your legs burn. Your lungs ache. Every reasonable part of your mind asks you to stop. The pain is real — it is not something you can think your way out of. But Murakami noticed something: the runners who fell apart were not always the ones in the most physical pain. They were the ones who had a difficult relationship with the pain. They fought it. They feared it. They made it mean something terrible about themselves or the world. That resistance — that inner argument with reality — is what wore them down.
He was not just writing about running. He was writing about the creative life, about rejection and silence and the long years of work before anyone notices. He was writing about grief, disappointment, and the ordinary erosion that time brings. He was saying: all of this will hurt. It is supposed to. But you get to decide whether it destroys you.
There is something quietly radical in this idea. It refuses to be a victim's philosophy, but it also refuses to be a cold one. It doesn't say pain doesn't matter. It says pain matters enormously — and that is exactly why we should not add to it needlessly. Most of our suffering is not caused by what happened. It is caused by our refusal to accept that it happened. We replay old conversations. We punish ourselves for mistakes that are over. We treat uncertainty like it is danger. We sit inside a story about our pain so long that the story becomes the pain — and the original wound, which might have healed, never gets the chance. The sentence is an invitation. A hard one. It asks you to feel what is real, and then to gently let go of everything you added on top of it.
What it asks of us? This is not a call to suppress feeling or to be numb. Murakami wept. He struggled. He wrote about loneliness and loss with more tenderness than almost any author alive. What he is asking is not don't feel — it is don't cling. Feel the pain. Sit with it. Let it pass through you. But notice when you stop feeling it and start narrating it — when you move from experiencing something to building a house inside it and deciding to live there. That is the moment suffering begins. And that is the moment you have a choice.
Pain will come for all of us. It already has. What we do next — that part belongs to us.
Comments
Post a Comment