What it means to put your heart in the marketplace

We’re all doing whatever we can to make sure that we’re not leaving any love on the table.

Linklater poses an apt question in his most memorable film:

Isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?

The short answer is, yes.

But in this endless romantic pursuit, we leave ourselves open. Love, this delicious madness, this raging fire, this heavenly frenzy, it is also the fatal vulnerability against which none of us are adequately protected.

That’s why, in the back of our minds, fear lurks like a hungry wolf. Prodding us with questions like.

Are you sure you want to allow this other person to be part of you?

Do you really want to give yourself over?

What if they reject you?

What if they don’t like what they see if you let them see your heart?

Worse yet, what if they do accept you, but then decide to leave you, and you’re left cleaning up the mess?

Better hold tight. Because the moment you love somebody, all of you will flow out like water out of a river, and there’ll be nothing left.

No wonder people can’t love fearlessly without the paranoia of being betrayed. Who can blame them?

But the irony of this whole bloody process is, we’re reaching for something that’s already inside ourselves.

Welshons, the great spiritual teacher, writes about this extensively in his work:

When we say we have fallen in love with another human being, what we are really saying is that they are a stimulus that turns us on to the place inside ourselves where we are love. Because love is an inner experience. It is a state of being within us. It is not given to us by someone else.

What if that were the real question? What if the journey was not about how we could be loved a little more by others, but how we could find new ways to access that place inside ourselves?

It’s a tremendous act of selfish imagination. And it takes everything we’ve got.

Courage, faith, resilience, patience, compassion.

But ask anyone who’s been to that place before. They come back a changed person.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What if your heart remembers nothing but the love it has for you?