It's a hard thing to see the pain in the world. Pain in a creature who is unable to understand what's happening is impossible to comfort. It's a hard thing to be helpless in the face of pain. I think it would be easy to look at that and turn your back just so that you don't have to see it any more. Easier to leave the place where pain lies naked and not to be ignored, to go somewhere blanketed in respectability and immaculate inoffensiveness. So simple to bury yourself in trinkets and amusements and bury difficult thoughts somewhere far away from your attention. But does easier mean better?
I don't claim to be an expert, or to have any great life experience, but I have become convinced that easier rarely means better. The hardest things always come with the greatest reward. In our case, I see this: there is enough joy to be had here to overcome the unavoidable pain. The end of life is fact, no getting around it, but with an end there must be a beginning! If you remember to soak up all the joy and wonderment of a calf first struggling to his feet and taking a wobbly step before promtly doing a faceplant, capture the laughter and savour it completely, live each moment completely as it comes, then when the end comes you can also remember that it's never really the end. There will be a new joyful moment to ease the pain of this one. Beginning and end comes again and again and without one you cannot have the other. Doesn't that joy make the pain worth it? Living a pristine life also means living the same sterile moment over and over again; it never gets worse, it never gets better. Don't we want it to get better?