Pain!...its thought-provoked??

For the last 3 days I have been brooding about problems that have been plaguing my health, rather insistently. Besides that sickly weak feeling and the lose of appetite, its the disappointment of losing the rythm of running 6 kms everyday, which I took weeks to establish. Now I pant and heave even when I climb a flight of stairs!! Ahh, depressing.
But hey..wait a minute, its not been 3 full days of disappointment and resentment. These bouts of problems have been well punctuated by long sleep innings. They have been a welcome respite from the brooding.
So, why does sleep put me out of this despair? I did exsist in sleep, still none of these pinpricks touched me. A little retrospection shows that the only thing different in sleep is the non-exsistance of thought, thought that is attributable to the intellect and ego.

So is the feeling of pain and despair, a mere game of perception? A game where the ego is the judge and intellect, perception and expectations the jury?? Does pain exsist, and if it does should it bother us and our routine to any extent at all? Do we really have to stand in the court of ego awaiting a judgement on whether a particular event should give us happiness or sorrow?

Extrapolating, are all positive and negetive emotions at the hands of our discretion? and if so, is it possible to always choose the former?

Your views pls.

The thoughts that flowed into this piece were triggered by an article in the blog - bhartie.