Making friends with heartbreak

It’s heartbreaking.

My heart is breaking.

I’m brokenhearted.

We say those words so often these days.

We are heartbroken when another mass shooting takes place. This time in Boulder, Colorado. Not so far from home.

Our hearts break. Each time the number of Covid-19 deaths crosses another unfathomable threshold. For each family that’s separated at a border. When a seemingly healthy friend receives a dire diagnosis.

Then so does another.

And another after that.

In Consolations: the Meaning of Everyday Words, the poet philosopher David Whyte writes: Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring about people and things over which we have no control…

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot.

Whyte repeats that line three times in his guided Heartbreak meditation, which I heard as a subscriber to Sam Harris’s Waking Up course. (There’s a free trial if you want to hear it.)

Whyte’s voice is at once both haunting and soothing.

If, as Whyte says, Heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life, then perhaps we should accept it. Not just as a consequence of things gone wrong, but of a life well-lived.

If, as Whyte says, heartbreak is inevitable and unescapable, perhaps we should make friends with it.

But how can we be a friend to heartbreak? I guess it’s the same as being a friend to anything (or anyone) else.

Good friends listen. Listening to heartbreak probably means slowing down and noticing how it feels. During the worst of the Covid isolation, I cried every day. I noticed that pressure would build, and the only way to release it was to let my tears flow.

Good friends respect boundaries. When we’ve had enough of heartbreak, it’s okay—healthy even—to take a break. We can even ignore heartbreak for awhile. The way we might an insatiable relation. Or a client who emails on Sundays.

Good friends make you feel good. If heartbreak happens when we lose a thing we love, then heartbreak also is evidence that we are capable of love. That we are fortunate. And that is a reason to feel good.

Befriending heartbreak won’t be easy. But since it’s never going away, how about we give it a try?

Because we can’t beat it away with a stick.