Sometimes I find it really insightful and enjoyable to think about common concepts or ideas and dissect them. To try to go beyond the words we normally use to convey their meaning and think about them at a much deeper level. In this conversation with Sofia we ended up doing that with the word "pain." Sofia started off stating "growth through trauma" as her most important value, so that set us down the path of understanding what trauma or pain actually is. So often we think of it as a negative thing (and rightfully so), but how do we make sense of the fact that so much growth and positivity can come from these same negative experiences? 

To step back for a second, Sofia is a law student, researcher, and podcaster (Raw Paradox Talks); but ultimately she is someone who is fascinated by the human experience and wants to understand it as best she can. She is also someone who has experienced a lot of trauma in her life, so when you put those things together you get a really thoughtful, genuine discussion about trauma and the role it plays.

What I found myself thinking about the most after this conversation, as I mentioned up front, is how inadequate words like "pain", "sadness", and "suffering" are in explaining what we actual experience as humans. How do we make sense of the world if some of the basic tenets are unreliable to us? How do we reconcile the fact that we want to feel "good" but must feel "bad" to do so. Most of us agree that pain is a necessary, sometimes beautiful part of life, but we take that idea for granted. How often do we question what kind of world it is that we live in where something that at a very base, primal level seems so bad for us, but is actually a source of beauty? 

If this sounds like really abstract thinking, I get it, because it is. But that was the spirit of the conversation Sofia and I had. Just two people who spend a lot of time thinking about life and the various experiences we've had, trying to make some sense of it.