You meet someone whom you feel inspired, whose energy lifts you up, and whom you entrust your heart. You feel stronger with their presence, a feeling that there is no substitute in this world.
But then if you are not one of the lucky ones, your heart breaks, and you are left bleeding. Your heart starts to get cold, shrinking slowly. It breaks into a million pieces, and the pain gets unbearable. And in that pain, something inside us quietly takes charge. We begin to protect ourselves, sometimes without even realizing it. We might imagine little guardians standing at the gates of our heart, making sure no one trespasses and hurts us again.
These guardians have all the good intentions; they just don't want us to experience the same heartache again. They will do their best to ensure our heart is closed. One of their tactics is cynicism: leaving no crumbs of hope, convincing us we'll be safer if we stop reaching for love. "I'll never find something like this again" you might hear an inner voice, full of hopelessness. And the waves of despair can hit you even harder than the heartache itself.
In moments like this, when hopelessness takes us over like a dark cloud and when we are crippled with the heartache, it is important to remind ourselves that the fact that our heart broke in the first place, is a proof that we had the capacity to love. In these moments, even a simple song lyric can become a lifeline, reminding us:
"I've loved before; I'll love again"
Yet still, we feel the urge to grow cynical and shut our hearts down. But then one wonders, isn't life too short to shut down our heart? It is true, if our heart is closed, we won't get hurt, but if our heart is not fully open, we might never taste what a real companionship is. And to have an open heart, we need to keep trying. As Beloved Rumi poetically says:
"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."
So, whenever there is a chance, we must open our arms to love. If it works, it's great, if not, we know that at least for a brief moment we felt loved. And really, what more could we want? Rumi reminds us that heartbreak itself can open us, and decades later, Raymond Carver, looking back at his life, put it even more simply:
"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."
And someday, I'll meet someone again. I've loved before. I know I'll love again.
The lyrics mentioned belong to the song, Strange Weather, by Anna Calvi & David Bryne