On love and loss and the courage it takes to embrace life wholeheartedly

“It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” – Oscar Wilde

I love. That is how I am wired. I fall in love over and over again. Heart-achingly, heart-breakingly, I fall in love. I don’t know if everyone is like this, but I think more of us are more like this than want to admit it. I know I have kept quiet about it for many years.

I learned early that it was not safe to love so deeply. Such an open heart leaves us open to everything including unkindness, but perhaps even worse, to pain. Because while the harshness of others can hurt – it can hurt like hell – I’m not sure anything hurts as badly as seeing those we love hurting and being powerless to help them. Unable to fix it. And when we can find love for everyone, then the pain of the world can be utterly overwhelming.

And the truth is that unkindness is all too often evidence not of evil but of pain. Those who have been hurt will often pass that hurt on to others. More pain to witness, more wounded loved-ones waiting to be loved.

So, with all that, why would anyone risk love?

And I don’t just mean romantic love, but neither do I want to get lost in the neutral sea of unconditional love. Those are both beautiful things but what I am talking about is that deep heartache yearning, matched and met in rare moments when your heart swells with the joy of connection when you witness someone beautiful and somehow familiar.

That kind of love which is not spiritual and transcendent – super-human – but painfully, beautifully human. It can be felt for strangers, and those we have just met, and well back to the surface with those we know very well or were born into family with but especially those we have always known. Those special souls who for a moment, or a time, or a lifetime we realise we have always known.

I spent years seeking to understand my own yearning, the fragile aching for something-I-know-not-what I felt so strongly. Well-meaning teachers told me to dig underneath the yearning , to seek the heart of the thing, to understand the psychological underpinnings of what was clearly a kind of dysfunction, wasn’t it? Some kind of compulsive chasing after love? Some broken connection that needed repair?

But all I found underneath the yearning was more yearning, and so it became a song of brokenness. More painful yet: not just the pain inherent in the yearning, the loving, but the pain of feeling it was a deficiency in me, a wound I could not fathom, a deep well I plumbed but never found the bottom of, it’s source lost in darkness.

Then a magical friend shared a different story, that this yearning might be a compass, that it held a truth perhaps rather than a deceitful song. This yearning meant that I had a soul-mate, someone to whom it was guiding me, a beloved. And this alternate story was a true moment of grace for me because it offered the possibility that this yearning I had always felt, that I could remember from childhood even, might not be part of my brokenness but of my wholeness.

I believe that this yearning does not just guide me to one beloved (though it has) but to many. I think we were made to love generously. But you can’t embrace loving without embracing loss. Every time you really love something you guarantee you’ll lose it, because even in the unlikely event that the moment of love lasts forever, everything dies. And the sad, painful truth about love is that the moment of love dies. Moments of love are like blossoming flowers, beautiful, fragrant, heady and gorgeous for a time but they fade. All too soon they fade.

This is why we must love generously: because every moment we can bask in that warmth of connection with ourselves and the beloved is precious and rare and fleeting.

Even linked with loss and pain, when it can carry such grace, why wouldn’t we risk love?

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the tragedy of our times, that so many of us have given up on love. The pursuit of cool has killed our capacity for abandon. And I don’t mean the abandon of the fanatic, that is a malaise, the last desperate refuge of those so terrified that they reject love completely.

No, the abandon I am talking about is the abandon of one so lost in love they are beyond the noisy judgement of the crowd, free to pour their hearts into the world. This doesn’t have to be loud, but to reveal it at all takes incredible courage. I hope one day to be braver in my loving, but for now I will settle for no-longer running away from it.

That is what my yearning was I think. A yearning to stop running away from love, a yearning to stand firm in the face of misunderstanding and say “I love you” in every moment, to every person, to every piece of art or wondrous thing which calls forth that response.

What could be more natural than that?

And what could be more terrifying?

“The truth is I pretend to be a cynic, but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get.” – Joanna Hoffman

Cynicism has become the default setting of an age, the baseline for ‘normal’. It could be argued that in a world so full of deceit, that cynicism is a sane response but I think the cynicism came before the common-place deceit of the modern political landscape, or perhaps the two grew in symbiotic parallel. Either way, we have lied to ourselves as much as we have ben lied to. We have numbed ourselves, and distracted ourselves, and sought false refuge from the painful tenderness of loving deeply. We have elevated cynicism as a kind of intelligent commentary on a painful world. It is a convenient distancer of our hearts from the pain of full-contact living but I want to see and be seen. I want to know and be known.

“Most people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage – however often we are hurt as a result of it.” – Erica Jong

I want to find the courage to be open-hearted. I want to keep showing up with soft eyes and a warm, indulgent smile for every beloved person and thing and moment that crosses my path. And I want your help. I want to be able to share that with you, that lightness and wonder, and yes, pain, and heartache. I want to dive deeply into the bitter-sweet melancholy that whispers in the poet’s ear and calls from the breaking waves on the shore. I want to fly in the face of everything the cynical voices of the world say, and love wildly, tearfully, joyfully. What greater rebellion could we stage?

“I was thinking that I might fly today
Just to disprove all the things that you say
It doesn't take a talent to be mean
Your words can crush things that are unseen
So please be careful with me, I'm sensitive
And I'd like to stay that way” – Jewel, Lyrics from ‘I’m Sensitive’

And even while all of that is true we have to acknowledge the tragedy inherent in loving, because rejecting cynicism doesn’t make us less vulnerable to tragedy either. Indeed, the tragedy strikes closer to home because we have invited it in.

The more deeply you love, the more deeply the tragedy of loss will wound you. And the more often you abandon yourself to that loving, the more frequently will you be wounded. Let us not wander blindly into these lands lest we stagger resentfully back out again.

Make no mistake: Loving deeply promises you a life of grieving often. Grief is the partner of love and I think that part of why we grieve so deeply when those closest to us die is because we don’t allow ourselves to grieve the rest of the time. When grief becomes strong enough to force itself into our lives, it comes in a great flood, overwhelming us with echoes of all of loves’ loss.

So join me dear ones in love and loss and grief and courage but know the journey you are embarking on. It will be wonderful and terrible. Wonder-full and terrible. To love takes fierce tenderness, brave sensitivity, conscious innocence. Paradox? Perhaps. May we all be blessed with the strength to embrace such opposites.