To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the perturbations of love is Hell.
(C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves)
1 comment:
When your heart gets broken it is really difficult to resist the overwhelming fear of having it happen again. After nursing it back to wholeness, you don't feel like you can fully surrender it again. To give it away, to lose control, to become vulnerable again...is too scary. Any pain you felt the first time becomes exponential as you run the risk of not only getting your heart broken again but feeling the fool for ever trusting another person with it. I think until it happens to you, it is hard to understand.
But as Lewis says, we stand to lose more by never taking that risk. After all is said and done, I'd rather be a fool than a cynic.
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