Love Expends and Renews Itself Repeatedly to Maintain an Open Heart

© 2010 Peter Free

 

04 July 2010

 

Ephemerality challenges us

 

Love expends and renews itself repeatedly to survive the continual assault of change, as the present serially flows into different nows.

 

Love causes and soothes the pain of loss

 

Love is the cause of, and the solution to, the pain we experience ─ as we continually meet and lose friends, pets, places, and states of being during the flow of living.

 

Non-attachment does not mean escaping sadness or avoiding joy

 

Emotional non-attachment diminishes one’s unrealistic attempt to hold onto ephemeral phenomena that inherently change.

 

But non-attachment is not the same as not feeling the sadness that occurs, when change deprives us of the spirit-to-spirit connections we made during a moment now past.

 

Non-attachment does not diminish the joys of fleeting, shining times.  Yet it knows that nothing lasts.

 

An example illustrates these ideas

 

For almost two years, I have been in twice-a-week physical therapy.  The technicians, assistants, and therapists who treat me are friendly companions in life’s short jaunt.

 

With each visit, I learn more about their lives, their likes, dislikes, ambitions, and the people who are important to them.  The same goes for many of the patients who shared my appointment times.  We all speak in a shared treatment space.

 

I treasure each person.

 

With the coming end of therapy (in just a few days), all these people will be gone from my life.

 

Given generational differences and busy lives, there will be no way to maintain touch.  We will lose the mandatory closeness ─ and its potential for rich communication ─ that hands-on treatment required. 

 

Maintaining a connection by visiting these therapists at their workplace (when I am no longer a patient) will not work.  Doing so would deprive their new clients of the interpersonal connections I treasured.

 

So, in just a few days, Life’s unstoppable newness will flow around us, splitting us from each other.

 

There is no antidote to loss, except a perennially-open heart and more of the same

 

There is no antidote to loss.  I will fully and repeatedly experience the sadness of missing these people and places they work.  This will continue for years.  It is in the nature of living with an open heart.

 

I will treat, but not mask, the pain of loss by extending love again.  Knowing that, too, will experience its own new sadnesses.

 

In the heart-to-heart connections of living is Life’s worth.