The dentist is a great place to practice. Patience. Courage. Trust. But most of all: avoiding needless suffering.
Yesterday, I went there to change a filling. “We can do it without anesthesia,” she said. As I lay there, listening to the drill, thinking about something else, I suddenly realized: I’m as stiff as a floorboard. I was tensing the muscles in my shoulders, arms, and legs. “Why am I so on edge?” I wondered.
On the surface, everything seemed fine. But underneath, I could sense I was worried, worried that, any second now, the drill might hit a nerve—and then I’d feel an intense surge of pain. “But wait a minute: If I stay this tight throughout the entire procedure, I’ll be in pain no matter what happens. Can’t I just relax until any potential agony actually arrives?” I tried that. It helped. My muscles loosened a bit. But every now and then, I could feel the anxiety coming back, and I once again had to remind myself: “There isn’t any pain yet. So relax.” Naturally, no pain ever came.
If actual hurt was the only kind we suffered, the world would be a very different place. You’d go to the dentist, scream perhaps once, most likely zero times, and go home. Instead, we wait for torment that never comes and, in the waiting, torment ourselves more thoroughly than life ever would.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” Seneca wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. Be it at the dentist, the office, or on a first date, it’s still true: The worst pain is not pain. The worst pain is fear—so let’s only cross the bridge of suffering once we come to it.