#defensiveness

Life is openness. We go through life with our eyes open; aside from sleep, we close our eyes only to cleanse them, and keep them safe from intense light or physical harm. Walking around with our eyes closed would be ridiculous.

We go through life with our airways open; we seal those only to protect ourselves from inhaling what we shouldn’t. Walking around with our airways closed would, equally, be ridiculous.

We go through life with our palms open too; we ball our hands up only to hold onto things, or to defend ourselves. To move through the world with permanent fists would be — you guessed it — ridiculous.

And while we may not go through life with our mouths open, what would happen if we kept them always clenched completely shut? How would we ever sustain ourselves? Opening our mouths lets us LIVE.

So what about our hearts? Some people think that a heart’s default state should be “closed.“ That we should only open our hearts under special circumstances, or only after we know with reasonable “certainty” what awaits us down the road, or only after others in our lives have “proven” themselves to us. But no. The heart, too, needs to be open if we truly want to live. Hell, “open-heart surgery” is the name of a LITERALLY life-saving procedure. Do you think this is an accident?

Leave the heart open, and the other details will fall into place. Leave the heart closed, and how can they ever? This might sound silly, but return to the hands. How do THOSE work? Leave the hands open, and you can receive gifts into them. Leave the hands closed, and it just isn’t possible. The heart works that way too. Go through life with your heart open. That’s how it’s meant to be. Treat anyone in your world with the same respect as you would treat someone you love, and the same willingness to care as you might show to people you’ve known your whole life. People don’t need to “earn” that you open your heart. YOU deserve your open heart. So relax and just let it BE that way. You can shield it later, at any time, if somebody shows you that you should. Like closing the eyes, or the airways, or the hands, you can close the heart too when it needs to be protected.

But the heart, like any of those other organs, was created for openness. Leave it closed by default, and you lose so much. You impoverish your experience. You create MORE of the pain you might have been hoping to avoid. You rob it of the chance to do what it was made for, what fortifies and nourishes it:

Love.

And you deprive yourself of the same.