Everyone worth knowing will break your heart.
They won’t mean to. Anything worth having is worth keeping, and you will someday give up your dearest friends, your parents, compatriots… even your children.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
There’s only one way around it: cut yourself off right now. Don’t go to that party with the people you care about; don’t share adventures with anyone; don’t hug your kids; don’t pass down family stories or date or even get a dog. People will tell you that you should live so you have no regrets and they’ll secretly congratulate themselves on their savvy, cut ‘n’ paste wisdom, but what are regrets except the extrapolation of what might have been if you’d just had more time to dance with the colorful pieces of your life?
Once you lose the capacity for regrets, you stop caring. Once you stop caring, you’re eight-tenths dead. May as well take the grey pill and slip into a warm bath where nobody can hurt you, ever again.
Some of our most painfully paid-for decisions, we make unconsciously.
Whoa, that’s cool — gonna git me one o’ those.
Because I love her, that’s why!
Congratulations. It’s a GIRL!
Then the motorcycle takes your leg or ends up at the breaker yard. The girlfriend slices a thick slab from your heart and hands it off to her new girlfriend. Your daughter comes to your bedside to forgive you before you die, and you try to look past the tattoo on her face to the baby whom you remember as filled with light and painless promise.
If you were aware of the costs in advance, would you have chosen differently? Had you chosen differently, would that have enhanced your life, or only secured it into a lukewarm, flannel predictability?
Counselors will tell you to own your mistakes, as though you have a choice. So funny! Acknowledge them or deny them as you please, but you can’t own your actions. Like bullets from a gun, once you choose them, they own you. They describe the hopefully lumpy and imperfect detours from the arc of your life; shutting off huge swathes of options, opening others.
There are no go-backs, no do-overs, no Mulligans. You never get a second chance. You may have a different chance, but you pay the ferryman for every crossing, right up until the day you drown.
A few years ago, I met the wrong girl. She wasn’t my social, political, sexual or religious flavor, and we both knew that instantly enough that neither of us made — for the first time in either of our lives — an unconscious romantic choice. She is my intentional undoing. She will hurt me as mortally as only a best-beloved can.
© Michael Pierce 2007
Some day in my increasingly foreseeable future, I’ll lose that girl when one of us leaves the stage. That loss will cost me more than I could possibly afford, tear away the biggest part of my remaining soul, and I will have regrets. She will likely be my last thought, no matter which of us first goes over the cliff, and I will fiercely regret every minute we spent on the administrative overhead of our lives, every adventure we passed up in pursuit of responsible adulthood.
That pain I vow to embrace, not regret. This woman, who wants to be mine and is, will have been worth every tear. That decision owns me. It owns us both. The mortgages that matter are owed to loved ones, not to banks.
What’s your next heartbreak? Let it be something you did, someone you knew that owns you. Let it not be a cringe, a whine, a survival mechanism that trades messy humanity for orderly security. Better to end the night with a pillowcase full of love — at any cost — than to be the kid who was too afraid to ever ring the doorbell and yell, “Trick or treat!”
"Jack Lewis takes the overall literary crown with his new book...there’s a lot more to Lewis’s work than what it feels like to ride motorcycles.” — Ultimate Motorcycling
"Insightful and from the heart ... a driven and much recommended look into the mind and conflict of the next generation of war veterans. " — Midwest Book Review (Reviewer's Choice)
Dammit, Jack, you almost made me cry again. Might still.
Did.
Any chance I could get a print-quality copy of that pic? There’s a place of honor in my rogues’ gallery in the new place for it…
Hi Glenn,
That picture belongs to http://www.baileyblackphotography.com/. Michael would have to release any high-res version.
– Shasta
Live with Vigor, Love with Passion, and keep a groat in your pocket for the ferryman,
Breaks the heart, yes. Breaks the heart open.
the version of the Five Remembrances offered by Thich Naht Hahn:
1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Live, or live not. There is no try.
The price for the exhiliration of new love, best friends, and the hug of a child is the pain of relationships ended, and children growing up. But I decided a long time ago, I didn’t want to have to give up the dance, simply to miss the pain.
I don’t want to give up beloved friends looking at me and saying “I’ve never seen you this happy”.
Pain sucks, but not as much as nothingness :).
Thanks, Jack.
Thanks so much for smacking yet another nail right where nails should be smacked.
I also appreciate the credit for the photo. Every time I see that image I can’t help but think of the fun day on the coast.
Be well my friend.
ps – contact me Glenn, I’ll get you a hi-res image for your personal use.
Yup. As the poem says, “but risk we must…”
Been there. Loved that. Have the scars and, as you say, will risk again.
Powerful and well-said. This made me cry. That’s a good thing.
I believe that life is a process of learning to let go. We cannot have perspective when things are held too closely – even something at arm’s length can be seen clearly.
Just the same, my arms and heart and mind certainly are full of all the things I hold close. 😉 Sounds like you’re juggling your share of things as well.
Damn that was good!
I’m literally bawling my eyes out here…. Because I’ve been there, because I am there, and because I know one day probably I’ll be there again… and because I know *that* kind of love.
Bless you two and big hugs
As always, beautifully written. You have a gift for putting life our lives into words.
Thanks for that.
Hear hear, Jack.
Excellent thoughts, eloquently expressed. Your words reminded me of a favorite saying that, for some silly reason, is no longer posted next to my monitor:
Life is drawing without an eraser.
The best love letter I ever read. Too bad it got so blurry there at the end that I could hardly see the words…
🙂
Yup. Still worth it.