When you lose confidence in yourself, the worst thing you can do is sit and wait for it to be restored. It won’t happen. You’ll feel worse.

Yet this is what we do; we despair because things aren’t going like we hoped. We feel down because of a ‘string of bad luck’ or fall prey to the insidious discouragement that comes along with ‘nothing good happening for a while.’

At the end John Fante’s book Dreams From Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

When explaining self-esteem to their patients, psychologists use the metaphor of two open cisterns that provide drinking water for nearby towns. When it rains, they both fill to the brim. But when it stops raining, one drains faster than the other. Why does one stay full while the other empties? It’s simple: it’s also fed by an underground spring.

We must find our own spring. And return to it when we need replenishment.

We can run a few miles as fast as we’re able. We can get absorbed in a book, so much that you forget the world around you. Or help someone. Have stimulating conversation. Go for a long walk. These things tap into something bigger than us and in the process remind us about that which is within us—what we are capable of. We simply need to seek it out.

The professional, Steve Pressfield writes in The War of Art, sometimes has to “throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time, just to let the boys know he’s still in business.” The boys in this case are those little doubts you get in your head, the ones that tell you that you don’t have what it takes, that the project isn’t worth it, that you’re not up to the task. Go out and remind the crowd why you’re in the arena. Do what you have within you but take for granted or are saving for later. Silence them by doing it. Remind yourself.

A common theme from the ancients is that of great, supernatural forces. A swirl of particles. Time as a river. Flowing energy. Incarnation. It might have stemmed from their ignorance of certain scientific concepts, but that was a benefit rather than a curse. This makes it easier to imagine tapping into something out there, finding nourishment in it, being moved forward from it. These were streams that they could depend on, infinite underground wells to fill their cisterns.

As I struggle with confidence in my own life and on my own projects, it’s helpful to think of this. It is replenishing, a little bit more each time.

There is this feeling you get when you’re driving a friend’s car or staying in a hotel. It is less stressful, easier. All the things and baggage you’ve allowed to accumulate in your actual life don’t seem to be there. You don’t look at the gas gauge and care. The things that bother you about your car don’t bother you in this one. You sleep better in the hotel. It feels nicer than your house.

If it could always be like this, you think, that would be the life. Which is funny because nothing is actually different. Unless you’re an asshole, you’re still paying for gas. Hotel rooms are actually filthy and you could buy all the stuff in them for your own house if you wanted. Yet it doesn’t feel the same.

This is because you’ve given yourself, as Marcus Aurelius would say, “the gift of the present moment.” It feels fresh because you are looking at it fresh. You appreciate your feelings because you’re aware of them, you’re alert for a change. Like you’ve taken a big deep breath and opened your eyes.

These glimpses are helpful because they remind us what we could have if we just got out of our own way. If we stopped minding the gas tank and caring whether it cost $3.59 or $4 a gallon to fill up. If we remember that we can move or, more realistically, rearrange the inside of our own house whenever we get tired of it. If a certain kind of blanket feels better, get it and be done with the issue. They remind us that all the things we say weigh us down are ours by choice.

Sometimes a quick shift in our environment forces us to focus entirely on the present–it doesn’t allow us to muddle up the situation with our thoughts and pessimism and worry. And the instant of lightness we feel when it happens, well, that’s what we could have all the time if we wanted to and worked at it.

There is much to be learned from pain. Especially physical pain. I would never say it warrants being sought out or needlessly extended but there is always a lesson in it. It makes for a good metaphor. And metaphors are the key to understanding the world, as well as ourselves.

I fractured my elbow recently in a fall from a bike. I got up to try to shake it off. Stay with it, I told myself as I made my way to the gym to clean up. Do you want you need to do in spite of it. The value of physical pain is that it is finite. It ends when the ailment ends. We can use this as an opportunity to push on through, with the safety net of knowing it will eventually be over. It is practice.

For every physical pain or ailment, there are a hundred emotional and metaphysical pains. Not just pains but conditions: anxiety, discomfort, fear, uncertainty, and failure. We may be scared to acknowledge these or have no faith that we can bear them. Our injuries, our broken bones, aches, flus, migraines, and diseases—the distresses that come, are dealt with in time and then go (thought they occasionally leave a lasting trail), they are proof that we have what it takes to reach inside and deal with the others. If you suffer from back pain it can cause you all kinds of stress so make sure you try neck cracking.

When you run and you get a blister. It hurts like hell for a minute—gets hot and pulsates, like an ember caught between the sock and the foot. If you’ve ever pushed through it, what happens is disgusting but wonderful at the same time. The skin bursts and the puss floods out, the body’s way of putting out the fire. The body, we forget, has all sorts of mechanisms designed to numb and treat pain. And so suddenly, it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Pain is a lesson in fortitude and also in self-awareness. In knowing our limits and our vulnerabilities. In a way it is a reminder that we are alive. Small or big, it prickles our senses and wakes them up—brings us back into the present, pulls us from our thoughts and to the physical. In many cases, it is a message that we are not in control.

What surprised me with my arm was that there was little sharp pain—sharp pain is easy to know what to do with. Take a pill. Clean a wound. See a doctor. But dull pain, dull pain is harder. We’re not as sure where to place it. Do we ignore and hope it will go away? Its what I did. All I felt was heaviness. Right up through the x-ray a few days later, I was sure it was nothing. Then it rose up and hit me in the room: I’m going to faint. I’m going to pass out right here from the pain in the middle of it all and promptly did.

We are not in control of pain. No matter how hard we try. Not of the cause or the duration—only the response. Through it we are given an opportunity to act our principles: justice, kindness, selflessness, moderation, self-direction. It offers the reminder that though pain is inevitable, suffering is not.

It’s funny because many of the toughest people shrink from facing these issues. Or are easily knocked around by it. They forget to stay with it, to push through, to do what they need to do in spite of it. Yet they face and endure the most trying physical calamities on a constant basis. This is to refuse to learn the lessons of pain. A failure to see what a calming, reassuring metaphor it is.