I had a rough day yesterday. It was one of those days where all I could do was get from my bed to my recliner, and then just sit. Even feeding Gordon his doggie breakfast was a chore; it took about an hour of sitting still and staring off into space to recover from that. The caregiver brought me a bowl of oatmeal; I ate about half of it. That was all I ate all day, not because I wasn’t hungry – I was ravenous – but because every fiber of my being and every ounce of energy I could muster was focused on one thing:  pain.

Pain is a universal human leveler in that everyone has confronted it at some time in their lives. It does not care who you are, what you believe, how much money you do or don’t have, or even how well-prepared you thought you were for its arrival. It just shows up, settles in, and demands to be endured. It introduces itself immediately, unmistakably, and without asking permission. You have no choice but to pay attention.

It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

Julius Caesar

Enduring pain is different from experiencing it. Experiencing pain is passive; enduring it is an act. To endure is to stay present while everything in you wants to escape. It is to wake up each day knowing relief may not come and choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to continue anyway. Pain tests not just the body or the mind, but the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can survive.

Pain comes with its own language, diagnoses, timelines. It invites sympathy. Pain gives you permission to rest, to complain, to be visibly altered by the experience. Enduring pain becomes a rhythm: managing flare-ups, counting breaths, measuring progress in what seems like inches rather than miles. We get our movies “on demand,” our pizzas in “30 minutes or less,” and our packages from Amazon the next day.  But pain upends these modern expectations: I’d like to say it teaches patience in a world obsessed with speed, but in reality it demands it.

What makes pain especially difficult is not just the sensation itself, but the meaning we attach to it. Pain often comes with questions: Why me? What did I do wrong? What does this say about my future? – another way of asking What if it never ends? The mind searches for explanations, patterns, lessons – anything to make suffering feel purposeful. Sometimes meaning helps. Other times, it becomes another burden. Not all pain arrives with wisdom attached. Some pain simply exists, unfair and unearned, and endurance means accepting the lack of narrative closure.

There is a myth that enduring pain makes you stronger in a clean, linear way. That if you survive something difficult, you emerge wiser, calmer, better. In reality, pain often leaves scars that complicate rather than clarify. You may become more cautious, more guarded, less willing to hope. You may lose parts of yourself you liked. Endurance is not transformation; it is preservation. It is keeping enough of yourself intact to continue.

And yet, there is something quietly profound in that act of preservation. To endure pain is to assert that your life is still worth living, even when it does not feel good. It is choosing continuation over collapse, again and again. Sometimes endurance looks heroic. Other times it looks like brushing your teeth, returning a text, or getting out of bed when the day feels too heavy to carry.

Endurance also reshapes time. Pain stretches moments, making minutes feel endless and weeks blur together. The future becomes abstract, something imagined but not trusted. In these stretches, endurance becomes about narrowing focus. You stop thinking in years and start thinking in hours. You don’t ask how you’ll survive this forever; you ask how you’ll survive today. There is humility in this narrowing, a recognition that endurance is built from small, unremarkable choices.

People often underestimate how lonely pain can be. Even when surrounded by others, pain creates a private world that no one else can fully enter. Language fails. Metaphors fall short. You may explain, but you cannot transfer the experience. Enduring pain, then, often involves learning how to be alone without feeling abandoned. It requires cultivating an internal companionship – patience with your own limitations, forgiveness for your own fatigue.

At the same time, endurance is rarely a solo achievement. Even when pain feels isolating, it is softened by moments of connection: someone listening without fixing, someone staying when they could leave, someone acknowledging the difficulty without minimizing it. Endurance is strengthened not by advice, but by presence. The knowledge that you are seen, even imperfectly, can make pain more bearable.

There is also an ethical dimension to enduring pain. Suffering has a way of sharpening empathy. Those who have endured learn to recognize pain in others, even when it is hidden or poorly expressed. They become gentler, not because they are weaker, but because they understand how fragile people can be beneath their surfaces. Endurance, in this way, quietly improves the moral fabric of the world – not through grand gestures, but through restraint, patience, and kindness.

Eventually, pain changes. It may lessen, transform, or simply grow quieter. It may never disappear entirely, but it stops demanding your full attention. When this happens, people often look back and wonder how they survived. The answer is usually unsatisfying: I just did. Endurance rarely feels intentional while it’s happening. It is only in retrospect that it resembles strength.