HEARTBREAK
is
unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over
which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who
inevitably move beyond our line of sight.
Heartbreak
begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it
colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not
a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most
average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love
relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument,
in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the
beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an
essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract
ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and
its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
Heartbreak
is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs
when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a
child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope
we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked
for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet
where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which
we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all
other human beings have experienced without exception since the
beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of
being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming
to care deeply for what we find along the way.
…If
heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look
carefully for it and to make friends with it, to see it as our constant
and instructive companion, and strangely perhaps, in the depth of its
impact as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward.
Heartbreak
asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no
alternative path. It is a deeper introduction to what we love and have
loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone
who has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the last
letting go.
...
‘HEARTBREAK’ In
CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015
