I run on a stone path behind my house, past a garden of lilies. A bee buzzes past me, and I adamantly flail at it. Sure enough, it lands on my arm and stings me before it retreats. The pain courses through my entire arm, and I start to cry. It hurts. I feel pain. I don't like pain.

I lay on my bed in the evening, gazing at a picture of a girl. We could have been a great couple, but it's all over now. I missed my chance, and there is no redemption. Tears well up in my young eyes, and I feel a different kind of pain attack me. Not my arm, not my leg. This pain strikes me all over, and isn't like the discomfort that a skinned knee or a stubbed toe yields.

What is pain? Why do we feel it? The suffering we endure when we fall over is not that difficult to grasp - it is very direct. But why do we feel bad when we are lonely, or when we lose someone special? I cannot recall the number of times I have sat lonely and depressed in my room, wondering why I feel the way I do. The answers aren't there, and there is no way to comprehend fully our feelings and emotions.

When we put our hand in a fire, our nerves send signals to our brain because the heat is damaging our hand. Our brain makes us feel badly, so we take our hand from the fire so we don't feel the pain. Does this relate in any way to the other varieties of pain? Does it mean that emotional anguish is a defense mechanism to protect us from harm?

Feeling lonely or alienated causes me pain. Perhaps this is because humans have a natural longing for social interaction. When we are not around people, perhaps our body reacts to this unnatural condition by making us feel bad. Just as we withdraw our hand from the fire, we try to make friends and we try to meet other people and enjoy their company so we don't feel the pain of isolation and alienation.

Our head is full of hundreds of chemicals that determine the way that we feel. When we feel happy, we can attribute it to some combination of chemicals floating around in our head. It seems silly that such things should govern the way that we feel - we would like to assume that we are in complete control and our emotional state is determined by our environment and our thoughts.

Yet often times I analyze my life and it doesn't add up. In high school I got good grades, had a pleasant social life, and a good job. I had very little reason to be sad at all, but that is the way I found myself feeling most of the time. It is frustrating to not know why you aren't looking forward to another day of life on this planet, and it is even more frustrating to suspect you have absolutely no control over it.

Perhaps we humans are too complex to ever successfully analyze our feelings and veritably know if we should or should not be happy. There is simply no way to know - too many variables to account for. If we are inable to satisfiably answer the question "Why are we here?", we certainly cannot expect ourselves to decipher the intricate workings of our emotions.