From The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis:
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable.
There was a time when my heart had become hardened in relationships with others. Chronic fatigue and depression had also set in and the “fight or flight” mechanism had definitely switched completely to “flight.” Then a close friend passed away. She didn’t just pass away, she disappeared for 11 days and when they found her they discovered she had taken her own life.
That was a dismal day.
But through the funeral and grieving process I discovered something amazing. There was an awakening happening inside me. Where I would normally have wanted to draw inside myself and stay away from people because getting too close means you may lose them, and that would hurt, I wanted to run to my departed friend’s other friends, share a pot of tea with them, and draw close to the ones who had loved my friend as much as I did.
And that felt really, really good.
Don’t allow anything to keep you from “feeling” ~ it only leads to a dark place. Instead, rejoice in the moment you are in. That is one of the key ingredients of overcoming or preventing depression.
