comparative pain

I miss meaningful conversations. Here it seems that most of the conversations I have, even with long time friends are just about surface things, don't get me wrong those things matter too, but it's just not as good of a conversation and I feel myself longing for a conversation with meaning...

Lately I have been thinking a lot about other people's pain. It is difficult to tell the pain that other people are feeling because obviously, we are not them and therefore cannot feel their pain. People also hide it, they build up walls so that no one can see into their souls where the deeps scars and wounds hide. This pain is especially hard to tell. Then we will go on judging people all over for how they act or what they do not even considering in the slightest what might cause them to do what they're doing, or if there is a tremendous or even a little amount of pain behind the action.

In the fall for a class I read C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain (be sure to add it to your summer reading list) in this work he talks about something I had never thought of before. He says that we cannot compare other people's pain to our own. For example the pain that you feel when your grandmother dies is not the pain that your friend will feel when the same thing happens to her. Because of this we cannot say that one's pain is greater than another's. I thought this was interesting because it can be easy to compare the pain of a friend or peer to that of your own, but you have to remember that they do not feel exactly what you feel. This concept for me is a little tough to remember at times.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure where I am going with that, but that is what i have been thinking about the past few days, if you have any thoughts, please share them with me.