If I didn't welcome pain as a learning experience, I wouldn't be talking to you, because I'd be dead. You say, "if there is no choice," but there is always a choice and one of the most critical choices is how you react to situations that are presented to you. The most basic and fundamental choice of all is the attitude with which you meet a new experience.
Obviously, you have a different idea of what it means to welcome an experience than I do; when faced with a wall, choosing to climb it is just as welcoming of it, if not more, as sitting there and staring at it. You don't reject an experience when it's presented to you; you welcome it and react to it. If you react by lying around mindlessly, then that's your perogative, but I would prefer to attempt to surmount the obstacle by understanding it. On the other hand, if you start screaming, "This isn't happening to me!", then I would say you have a problem, because you're not welcoming the experience at all; you're reducing your ability to understand by denial and rejection.
If 50 thugs are beating me to a pulp, I want to know why. Most likely, I'll want to get out of there: I am a bit attached to my life. But maybe I don't want to. Maybe I've chosen to be kicked to death as a sacrifice. Maybe escape would be a really bad thing. But I'd have to understand why before I could make that choice. Maybe I want to take down as many as I could with me. In that case, I'd fight back, if I could. Or maybe I don't; in which case I wouldn't. But I'd need to know why. Then I'd have choice.
As for fun, getting kicked over and over wouldn't be fun, because that's happened to me before. It would be painful, but it would also be slightly boring. I've been kicked plenty of times in my life; it's hard to imagine someone coming up with a novel method of kicking me that would be interesting. I've been kicked three times in the unprotected groin, once so hard that blocking it put me on the ground, and hell, I've been landed on by a flying kick, though I guess that doesn't really count as a kick. Then again, pain is always interesting, so that'd keep the experience fresh. But it'd be fun to see how long I could last, to play psychological games with the thugs, to see whether or not I could slip at just the right moment and cause them to hit one another, or whatever. It would certainly be fun to infuriate them by smiling jauntily with a couple missing teeth, or by sticking my tongue out at them, or to show off the rib they've exposed as if I were trying to fashion a woman out of it. Well, that'd only be fun to me; it'd be really hard to explain it to them while getting kicked in the face. Maybe I could convince them to stop long enough to let me go through the motions.
But I don't know for sure until I actually experience it. Maybe none of that would happen. Probably not, in fact. But it'd sure be interesting to find out.
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