Inside Out

There is a saying. When a life breaks, when a heart breaks, there is a crack so the light can get in. Comfort lives in that notion. Something, this outside light, waits to heal us, to make things better. Kiss it and make it feel better. Most of us learned that in childhood and had that belief reinforced in many ways. No matter the ailment, there was an external remedy. An aspirin for a headache, a physician for an illness, a teacher for the ignorant, a minister for the soul. The world is organized in that way and it is good. We follow the Fall so we are broken, therefore sickness, pain, and evil.

Think of an heirloom jar with a crack in it. The good contents are ever seeping out and needing refilling. The jar needs repair, some healing, in order to retain its value. Else a leaky jar is not long for this world.

Likewise, we require patches and fixes to hold us together. We need those physicians and ministers and instructors and psychiatrists and on and on. A human being is a complex thing in need of complex care. Because life is hard.

To know there is a fix out there is a comforting, if sometimes frustrating, belief. There’s an app for that, a specialist who has just what you lack. Commercial society is built upon that principle. We are broken and incomplete, we are broken things in need of fixing, and wholeness is just a merchant away. So we are taught and so we believe.

How would life be different if we turned that idea inside out? What if we are always whole? What if the crack is not for light to get in but for light to get out? What if the broken heart is telling us to love more, not less?

Jesus said the kingdom is within, Buddha said clinging causes suffering, Elvis said go to Heartbreak Hotel. What if they were all right?

Loss is a part of life and we wholly embrace the idea of scarcity. We treasure possession. So we hold those we love as closely as possible, believing they fill us up or complete us in some magical way. Two hearts beating as one. Since we see love, like everything else, as a commodity, we strive to secure it. As though we could lasso the wind.

When an event occurs which we perceive as a loss of love, whether it be infidelity, breakup, or death, we think we have lost a part of our self, that we are once again incomplete, the very dreaded state we believed we had overcome through an exclusive relationship with another. We suffer the loss not just of that person but of that part of our self over which we gave them dominion. Of the two, the external loss fades first. As the adage goes, time heals all wounds, and the physical separation from another is a wound as surely as a paper cut. The internal loss, though, is not a wound. It is only a perception, a thought, we refuse to relinquish. A thought stands no healing, for it is either held or it is not. Once the thought that we are unwhole is released, we realize we are always whole.