"Apparently neural impulses travel anywhere from two miles per hour to two hundred miles per hour. Pain impulses travel at the slowest of these speeds. I'm not a scientist, but that's what scientists have measured. The say that the sensation of touch travels faster. They say if you stub your toe, you feel the pressure of the object almost immediately, but the pain doesn't hit until two or three seconds later.
...but my perception is that emotional pain moves at electric light speed. Here, watch. Think of a person close to you. The closest to you. The one you find it most difficult to picture existence without. Then imagine them gone. Gone as in no longer living and breathing the same air as you. Ever. Feel that? It is practically immediate. Heartbreak happens promptly. At electric speed your world is dissolved. But if it's true--that touch travels faster than pain--then maybe we need those around us to pull in close, to beat it to the punch, or to brace us before we're shattered....
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. And heaven, if we're to believe what was proposed by a man two thousand years ago, is a kingdom coming and a kingdom here and now; something for the present, not reserved entirely for the ever after. Right now we exist somewhere between here and there, and bluegrass carries the high lonesome song of our condition in its soul. None of us are getting out of here alive, but we will conclude that death is not the ultimate calamity. We will conclude that community is necessary for truly living despite even the pain potentials it creates.
To live solitarily is to be avoided. Touch travels faster than pain. Death does not win. It is the beginning."
---David Crowder, Mike Hogan Everybody Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die or (The Eschatology of Bluegrass)
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