Heart & Mind

After talking with a friend who has faced many relationship disappointments...

I was sitting here thinking about the heart's capacity to love. I guess that could be said for any emotion but I was pondering love and not an alter emotion at the moment. A parent's capacity to love one or a dozen children uniquely and at the same time equally. A person's generosity in loving friends who disappoint him again and again. An achiever's ability to love each accomplished goal as if it's his first, whether a chef with a new creation or a rock climber reaching new heights. A lover well past his prime finding love again after so many completed relationships.

It's amazing to me that the heart has the ability to let go and continue on with anticipation of something new. Perhaps this can't be said about those individuals who allow themselves to become embittered and closed off to emotion. Life evolves and we're created to evolve along with it. It's our own selfish intentions which stymie the process.

Not everyone can remember all the people they've been intimate with but I'm sure they can all name those who've touched their hearts whether romantically or in some other way. Those able to make us feel the finer emotions become part of us and we can never separate ourselves from them and the influence, regardless of how significant, they've had on our psyche. Certainly, there are some I'd like to eradicate from my own but, then again, would I? Who I am today is in some measure due to their presence in my life. Connections, whatever the duration, are never broken completely for those persons' lives touched ours and we're forever changed.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. If I were to lose my memory and all thought, conscious and subconscious, of that person and times shared, I'd have no emotions connected, would I? The mind and heart do not operate without one another and are perfectly synchronized normally. Of course, it would take something traumatic to cause a complete loss of memory. I hear hypnosis could erase unwanted memories or alter my response to them.

Ah well, I guess I'm pretty matter-of-fact about love, in the romantic sense. I logically recognize that the heart does not actually break though it sometimes feels as if it must. I know that the healing process is indeterminable and different depending on the depth of emotional attachment. But I also know that the heart's capacity is not limited and that it does not always follow logic. It cannot discern the varying qualities which bring love to us. It's just the recipient of the brain's suggestions based on so many criteria put into place by genetics and life experiences. Though our minds gather the positives and negatives of a person, the heart determines how they're balanced. We sometimes ask ourselves, or others ask it when they witness us, how we can love the ones we do. Obviously there's a connection we value on some level or we'd not end up in the relationships we do.

One thing is inescapable...love does go on, love is possible, love is plentiful if we remain open to it and can endure the disappointments and heartaches which ensue when it's taken from us.