Sitting with heartbreak
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It's already April! This time 5 years ago I was in Yogjakarta traveling alone, celebrating of my college acceptance, and now I'm done. It felt like a dream. I started my blog around that time too, and now look at this Enzyme newsletter, an organic thing that grows from my messy mind to yours :-)
I've been struggling with writing a post, and now I'm back in the writing :-) This week is something slightly sad to complement the joy of the 5-year celebration. You want to get the full experiential palette, don't you?
Sitting with heartbreaks
“To allow oneself to feel deeply and thoroughly what has come into our being is to change our future, simply by living up to the consequences of knowing what we hold in our affections.” — David Whyte.
The unexpected sourness of giving
A few days ago, I was heading back on my motorbike, feeling nimble, light and open. My body was soft like well-pounded meat from an hour of dancing. The sunset, the breeze, the crowd, everything was tender.
A quiet sense of gratitude arose in my heart. “To be born human is already a gift” as my Buddhist mom often told me. It’s a wonderful miracle to have a body that can breath, see, sense and taste the tenderness of life.
Tenderness is a strange state of being. It is vulnerable, naked, empty, sometimes joyous, oftentimes sorrowful. Sensitive people cannot help but be that way. Others, particularly the thinkers like me, find it almost nonsense: why would anyone want to be like that?
“Why” is a question of the mind, what modern science would consider as a relatively recent development with the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The body only asks “what”. The mighty mind, as useful as it is, can get overbearing. It often has to be defeated or exhausted before an intuitive answer can emerge.
A street vendor approached me as I unlocked my bike. He wanted to sell me some chewing gum. I looked at him, a tiny grave man in his sixty whose blurred eyes kept gazing downward under his tattered round hat.
It’s often a tricky situation. I said “Hi uncle, I don’t need it today”. My mind tells me not to give in. I appreciated that he was selling something, not simply panhandling. I didn’t need more chewing gum, and I wanted give to him only because he really needed it. I’ve internalized the idea that giving like this is only supporting further unsustainable dependency, not self-reliance.
He kept standing there, which made it harder for me. I could afford to give, but I wanted to give out of generosity, not of pity nor guilt. A part of me was afraid: I cannot always give like this. I’m not a Boddisattva yet, so maybe I have to make some rules to simplify this, something like only give on Friday to the first two people I meet.
He kept standing there, gazing downward.
Guilt kicked in. I said to him “I wish you a good day” and then gave him some small changes in my pocket. He took it, rather lifelessly. It was 5000 dong, a tiny amount after all. Before he turned away, I asked how long he has been selling the chewing gum. He barely answered “One year”. It was almost as if I was buying an excuse for a question, for a chance of human connection, an acknowledgement of other as a person even when I didn’t buy what he sold.
Then he walked off, dragging his slippers across the street. I looked at him, a hollowness spreading in my chest as if this man just drilled a nail there, tied a string around and tore it apart with every step.
The moment stuck with me on the way home. A part of me felt a bit upset as if I were cheated, as if someone tricked me into this helplessness. I was giving out of obligation and resignation “Ok fine you win, stop guilt-tripping me” rather than out of love. That felt really sour.
I wasn’t feeling generous, not even relieved that I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. I was mostly sad. Recently I’ve been trying a practice of giving with a focus on the inner transformation. When I give something, I don’t expect anything external in return but I do look for a sense of beauty and joy. None of those happened then.
I’m sad because he might have been too tired to say thank you or show any sign of gratitude. Or maybe he wasn’t trained in basic manner. There might even be a lot of shame in being a vendor like that. A ruthless part in me wanted to say “Of course he was that way. Had he had better manner, he might have been a very good salesman”. That is a classic chicken-and-egg issue in any developmental economics: poverty led to lack of education led to further poverty. I would love to address it systematically, but what happened right there in that moment wasn’t an intellectual issue. It was a question of how human being interacts with another.
Am I superior to expect good behaviors through my money, like parents rewarding children for earning good grades? Or am I looking to bring more beauty into the world with my gift?
A moment ago I was reveling in the serene beauty of life; a moment after this non sequitur happened. C’est la vie, une vie absurde.
As I wrote this story, I remember a story by a friend of mine, a kind-hearted young woman working at a big investment bank at Wall Street. One day she saw a homeless man lying outside her usual grocery store. Her good heart stirred, and she bent down to give him a loaf of bread. To her chagrin, the man wiped her hand and threw the bread away. Her banker job has been hard and dehumanizing with computers all the time. The rare moment where she could feel a human connection with this homeless man, she was rejected, almost violently. She broke down in tears as she shared the story at a retreat, her raw, beautiful, pained soul laid bare to us.
Is the lesson there not to pity on people? Or only give the right thing to people who really need it? No. Lesson Zero: before any moral lesson can be extracted, am I so blind to ignore that something is really fucked up about the world?
Some people get angry at this fucked up reality and express their righteous indignation outward by calling some others evil. It’s an example of what Brene Brown calls “common enemy intimacy”. Just look at how people bond over trashing the US president right now. Anger, like fire, is a raw passionate life energy that can protect and keep us warm but oftentimes can also burn the unskilled. I used to have a lot of such anger, directed inward at my own inadequacy: how am I not doing anything to help this situation?
Now I realized I wasn’t blind as much as I was numb. I needed heart-breaking moment like my friend’s story or my encounter with the street vendor to wake up a bit. Moment that will teach me about kindness, as Naomi Shihab Nye has written in her poem of the same name.
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. “
Sitting with heartbreaks
I was wondering why I wanted to share those stories. Writing this piece felt like wrestling with an inner daemon, exhausting, pointless, even devastating. Perhaps I learned a lesson or two from doing so, but mostly it felt like scratching the tender tissues around a freshly healed wound. It’s painful.
The reason comes from the opening line by that woke me up recently. I need to feel deeply and thoroughly what has come into my being.
As a guide, I work with many people now who are introspective enough to feel somewhat lost and unfulfilled in their lives even though they are good at what they do and get compensated well for it. The keyword here is “somewhat”, for if we really stay with our lostness, we may realize that it is ok, even essential part of the journey.
We all need to find, or rather to be in touch again, with what it is that we love, and a good way to do that is to sit with our heartbreaks. When the heart breaks, the mind stops thinking, giving way for a different kind of knowing and a different question. It’s not “What’s wrong with me”, it’s “What is it about me that resonates with the world this way?”
I keep thinking back about my encounter with that vendor. Behind the pain, there was a love of a world where people give and receive with respect and care. As I’ve written in this story with a teacher, once you have tasted the beauty of a gift well-given and let it thoroughly come into your being, it’s hard to settle for less.
Those moments of small heartbreaks are important, for over time they help refine our unique taste for life and for the connections between ourselves and the world. Our future changes when we sit long enough with the acknowledgement that each of us, in different ways, has inevitably fallen in love with an aspect of our world, from a person, a family, to a place or a cause etc.
Once we let ourselves love and be loved, there is no insurance against heartbreak. The question is who and what do we want our heart to be broken by, and how might we cultivate the courage do it again and again? How might we live in touch with the heart — “cour” — like Albert Camus whispers to himself everyday, “to live close to the point of tears”?
I don’t have an answer, but I know I am asking that question.
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe” — Joanna Macy.
Thank you for reading. Join more of this musing at my weekly digest, Enzyme for Thoughts.
Sharing is sprouting.