My roommate shared this quote by C.S. Lewis with me last night and I can't stop thinking about it. At first it read like a new take on a popular sentiment (better to have loved and lost...that kind of thing), and then the last sentence hit me in the gut. In a good way, I think.
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be 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 all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
2 comments:
holy cow. wow. and everything else. that really is a gut-puncher (in the best way possible). i love how vulnerability--or allowing ourselves to be vulnerable--is what makes us able to feel, love, connect. it's not weakness but a desire to be moved by another person.
thank you so dearly much for posting this - so that i could similarly share it with a roommate, and remember how important it is to let ourselves be vulnerable.
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