As a beekeeper, I’m willing to be stung now and then. In exchange for the rare sting, I get a front-row seat to beauty. By opting to ‘feel’ the bad, I get to experience so much that is good. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that “Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality - not the medicine you would have chosen, perhaps, but an effective one all the same.”30 She rightly sees the ways in which pain snaps us to attention to the very real world around us.
