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For Friday, March 22: Close your heart and you miss out

You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to the things you don't want to feel.  Johnny Depp

The heart feels what it feels. Absorbs what it absorbs.  Even the hardest hearts that have walls built up feel and absorb.  Unwillingly yes but even those hearts feel.  Unlike the eyes that can close to the hard things that will make us feel things we don't want to, our hearts cannot close to those things.  I've seen this happen when traveling through the slums.  I know a woman (no it's not me referring to myself in third person) who walked through the slum of Mathare Valley with me.  She closed her eyes to what she saw and she tried and tried and tried to close her heart but she couldn't.  And the more she tried the angrier she got and the more upset she became.  She found a person to be the target of her anger.   Someone who she funneled all that she was trying to ignore her heart was feeling.  If she would have only allowed her heart to have its way it could have been different.  When we try to close off our hearts to what presents itself for feeling we do a disservice to ourselves and the people in our lives.  Our hearts need to feel all things; joy, pain, happiness, anger, gratitude, etc.  Those are the things that we process and sift through and in the end give us perspective into life.  Delaying the inevitable, stalling on absorbing the painful things only serves to make us and others unhappy.  Not too mention we end up missing out on some great opportunities to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  My slum example?  Closing off her heart to feeling what she saw and felt only led her to stalling out on being part of the solution.  She missed her chance.  Close off your heart and you'll miss yours too.

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