10/8/2022 Giving up is always an option but surrender either takes away or limits your ability to choose and even to live. When you surrender to pain you greatly limit any chance of finding relief and especially strength to find life within the pain. If you surrender to death you throw away life and settle for an existence of pain becoming who you are. On a Japanese TV show a character said To choose life leaves you open to many possibilities while choosing death takes away all possibilities. Choosing life or death is not something we do one time or even daily but is choice we must make when we want to give up.

I share this not as something from a self-help book but as what I have learned from facing emotional and spiritual pain as long as I remember and intense physical pain since I was 19. The last 7 to 10 years have seen my pain grow to beyond endurance which medications and a spinal stimulator only made somewhat bearable.