Pain is the work that needs to be done. The choice that faces us all is whether to buckle down to it or avoid it. Most, of course, chose avoidance. We engineer an anodyne life that backgrounds pain in the hope that pleasure will come forward. But, to the soul, such a life is clearly false because painkillers reduce our ability to feel anything – they dampen the spirit. Hence depression – an inability to grasp the bull by the horns because letting go, walking away and becoming busy with something else is always presented as such a tempting option.