The heart is a strange place. It is the motor that makes the body function, pushing blood throughout our bodies. It beats and pumps and is something that we can't live without. We talk about broken hearts and happy hearts like it's our emotional center and maybe it is. It can malfunction and it can beat irregularly. We can shock it into normal rhythm and we can clean out its arteries, we can fix holes in it and we can take medications to make it function more strongly. We can hear its beat and we can see it beating on a pregnant woman's ultrasound. We use it allegorically in songs, like an achy-brakey heart or that we left it in San Francisco and it seems to be the center of our emotions, like it has feelings of its own. We talk about giving away our heart or holding someone close to our heart and speak about it as if it has a mind of its own, like "It is the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance." We read studies that show that bad relationships can literally hurt the heart, that those with worst close relationships are 34% more likely to have heart attacks than people with good relationships.
Yet, we crave intimacy, even though our past relationships may have been difficult and caused us pain. We have a strong innate desire to bond with another human being, a great pull to be known and loved for who we are. We want to fall in love, to lose ourselves in another's arms and heart, regardless of our past experiences or our current fears. We stay in bad relationships and often seek the same type of person who caused us hardships again and again. When our heart is involved, we seem to stop thinking, or we think but we ignore what we know and proceed full speed ahead into a relationship that is obviously doomed to fail. Or we allow past pain to hold us back from love, wounded by loving the wrong person, yet still failing to recognize that we can just change our choices and be more likely to create fulfilling relationships in the future.
What made me think about this, how our heart is so involved and our head so absent when it comes to love? I've been receiving emails about the upcoming party, emails from men who are anguishing over whether to come or not. One guy wrote that he was thinking about the party all week and decided that he wasn't up to going, that a party situation would be difficult for him because he's depressed and just needs one person to talk to. Another wrote that he was afraid to attend because he didn't have the right clothes to wear and was afraid to be rejected because of his lacking wardrobe. But to me I think it's just a party, a fun place to spend a few hours, with the possibility of finding someone we find appealing and who would find something in us that makes them want to know more. I think these guys are making excuses not to participate but that maybe it would make them feel more alive to be part of such a fun social time. I can't know into their hearts or believe I know what's best for them, but I can't help thinking that a time socializing with other single people their age would be good for them, maybe lift that sad guy out of his funk or show the wardrobe-challenged guy that he is worthwhile, regardless of his outsides.
Fear is such a motivating factor. Sometimes I think that many or most of our decisions are based on fear. Fear that we will fail, fear that we'll be rejected, fear of being made to look foolish. Yet the most gratifying things in life are not the easy ones but are those that make us stretch or bear the possibility of failure. Succeeding at the easy stuff can hardly equal the times when we pushed through the fear and did it anyoway. I remember one of my Wowettes coming to the last party, staying only for one hour because she was so anxious about socialing, yet she recounts it as a victory, that she didn't stay home but went out and did something so difficult and even that one hour was a great success, making her more willing and able to do something scary the next time.
I'm not sure the point here, except that we are all human, that we all feel the same emotions and pain, that life is for the living and that we might have some obligation to ourselves to enjoy it fully and walk through those fears. I have a tendency to want to stay home and avoid people, but I know I am most alive and happy in social settings, that being with people is invigorating and often a time when I feel great joy. So I hope that those out there with trepidation about the party will just do it, stop thinking about what might happen, and just show up and be open to what the night will bring. You never know, you might just have a good time, meet some other single people with the same issues and feelings as you and leave feeling more excited about life and who you are. It might be just what the heart doctor ordered!
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