When the heart breaks | Lisa Steingold

When the heart breaks

There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak....

My heart feels broken. Literally. As though it’s shattered into a million and one pieces. Please no need for condolences, I unfortunately am not alone and (I) know that as you read this you can identify as a result of your life’s own heartbreak.

You can either identify for now or have felt this way at some point in the past. It’s the damned thing about being human, as much as we sign up for joy, so we must experience heartbreak and I’ve often thought the ability to experience the former fully is absolutely correlated to our experience to allow the latter to transform and shape us.

The loss of a child, parent or loved one. The loss of a job, business or dream. Unrequited love. The catastrophic ending of things. The deep displacement and disappointment of betrayal. The state of the world. Our hearts break for a number of reasons and whilst our experience thereof is nuanced and different, there’s no denying the shared experience of it all and the deep effect on one’s soul as a result.

I don’t want to get into the details of why I feel like my heart is broken save to say the deep loss of certain individuals from my everyday life, as a result of a pending move, hurts more than I can articulate.

Its ironically only through this experience of loss that I’ve realised what love is. Now I really understand that true love is letting go when all you want to do is hold on. I’ve come to understand you’ll never need to fight for someone or even something and that different stories have different endings and different seasons. For some of our relationships, the season is short and for others its long and even happily ever after (yes those stories do exist). You, and I, my friend however never need fight for the length of time.

Que sera, sera – what will be, will be.

Sounds cliche but its the truth.

There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.

[…]

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.

~ David Whyte

Make no mistake I’m moving with many dreams in my heart and many adventures ahead of me but that by no means diminishes the loss I feel. To deny it would be to deny truth and to deny truth is to live at odds with life itself.

I wanted to share this because I believe that in sharing we are reconnected and that many of us find ourselves in this space in this particular time in the world. I have no 7 steps to healing with which to mend your broken heart only to save give yourself to grief, however briefly and you will find yourself moulded and shaped in her arms.

Where it will lead I cannot tell you, all I can say is I’m with you on the journey.

With love

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