The Gifts of Heartbreak & Loss
Heartbreak and loss; we’ve all been there. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s arrived at our door, what time it arrives, or how it arrives. Sometimes it arrives in the form of death and bereavement, or in the ending of a love relationship, or within an enduring relationship. Sometimes loss and heartbreak arrive quietly, trickling in through the cracks in the floor like a slowly sinking ship, and we may not notice anything is out of the ordinary at first. Even as the water continues to fill the lungs of our ship, we may live in denial, believing the cracks will be sealed before it’s too late. It’s not until the water is up to our necks that we may be able to admit that we are drowning, by then our ship lost and our only hope to learn to swim to shore. Then again, sometimes loss comes crashing through the windows of our homes like the winds of a hurricane, leaving a wreckage in its wake; sweeping the heart of all which it treasured like a thief in the night, and vanishing just as quickly before we’ve had the chance to make sense of any of it. We are left with nothing but open ground on which to begin building ourselves up again.
Regardless of how heartbreak and loss arrive, it never fails to transform us. We cannot return to who we were before loving took place; nor, I suspect, would we want to. The way I see it, we have all been brought to this earth to learn and grow our spirits into…
