Hearts are meant to be broken

Your pain

is the breaking of the shell

that encloses your understanding. ~K. Gibran

When I came out of my house the other day, my neighbor and his two little girls approached me. Dad was carrying a bird’s nest and I commented on it. Julia, who is 4 and precocious, piped right up “We are going to have a funeral.” Dad filled in that they had been watching a nesting Mourning Dove pair for a few weeks and were anxiously awaiting the baby birds. “It fell and the eggs got squished!” announced Julia’s older sister Tamara. “Oh no!” I said and immediately my mind went to who knocked it down, who do we need to talk to about, it etc. Julia brought me back though. “Yeah, we are going to go later and scoop the eggs up. They are all bloody.” At that she winced, and then teared up a little, “it’s sad” she said. Her older sister had moved away and dad was ready to talk about the ‘whodunits’ with me, but thank goodness for Julia. Her little heart was broken for these little squished eggs and brought the two adults back to theirs. “I think it is sad too.” I said. Dad adds, “we are going to have a little ceremony later on.” I nod looking at this beautiful open-hearted girl work through her grief at lightening speed. “Maybe we can bury them in our back yard so that we can visit them and they won’t miss their mommy and daddy.” She was sad, feeling the loss of the little birds that she was waiting for and now would never see, making sense of the bloody eggs and what they meant, and sorting out how to deal with the separation that loss brings by burying them close to her. “Maybe we can leave a note for their mommy and daddy birds so they know where to find them?” With that dad and the girls moved into the house talking about why birds can’t read.

What I was reminded of from all of this is that hearts are meant to be broken. Put another way, hearts are never meant to become unbreakable. We are supposed to feel the ordinary losses of our day to day lives and have it deepen our compassion for ourselves and for others. The goal has never been to live unscathed by our pain, even though you would never guess that by what we see all around us these days. It seems like every where we look, especially in the media, we see messages telling us all the ways we can move away from discomfort - physical, emotional and spiritual. We have been conditioned to believe that pain is unnatural, sadness is a problem and that we are supposed to be happy all the time. Not only is that impossible, it would be horrible for our culture if it were possible. The Narcissist would reign, and empathy and mercy would leave our world. It is through our experience of our own pain that we find our way to our humanity, and to letting go of our delusion of perfection.

We all start out like little Julia, openhearted children, vulnerable to our feelings, impacted by the world around us. Then we meet the world of the adults that have gone before us. We are taught, through word or deed, the consequences of having an open heart. Sometimes it is a positive thing, but most of the time it isn’t. We learn to protect our hearts from the world and the other people in it, believing that if we don’t it would not survive the pain of it all. We cover it with layer upon layer of protective batting, or we find a safe place to keep it, away from the world of others hearts. A lot of the time we just find ways to numb our selves to our feelings, period, removing the risk of vulnerability to them. We learn to shift from heart-centered to head-centered and think our way through our relationships and our lives.

There is really no such place as safe when it comes to our hearts, there is only alone. The distance we maintain from our pain translates into our distance from those we love. By risking a broken-heart, or an unprotected one, we allow our hearts to cover the distance to each other that our minds have created trying to keep us safe from feeling. As Stephen Levine said, “The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.”