Be a Student of the Heart

I am a perpetual student of the heart, my own as well as others. To make comprehension even more difficult, my heart keeps changing as I keep getting older, and hopefully wiser. It is like striving to apprehend an elusive form that is both moving, and also evolving as it moves ever forward, while holding on its treasures from yesterday.

When one person changes in a relationship, the relationship changes as well. And since both people are changing in this inexorable process of growing up and growing old, it takes real work to stay current with yourself and the other. It is easy to fall behind in knowing yourself and your loved ones.

If there is no heart-to-heart sharing, you will lose touch with one another. A dysfunctional relationship is one where the persons do not talk about the important things like pain, hope, fear, need, and desire. Therefore, intimacy is lost, while deceptive masks of sameness are put on.

The amazing reality is, we are both changing and staying the same. It is equally true that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and that the more things stay the same, the more they change. To love another, you must love who the person is, has been, and is becoming. You must love the other in both the mental snapshots you treasure, the moments never to be forgotten, which include priceless time-lapse inner videos of mutual events, feelings, and images of what was. You also need to recognize what is emerging and what is passing away.

W. B. Yeats wrote a poem, “When You Are Old,” that poignantly addresses being loved across time and personal changes. This poem has haunted me since I first read it during my sophomore year of college:

“When you are old and gray and full of sleep/ And nodding by the fire, take down this book,/ And slowly read, and dream of the soft look/ Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;// How many loved your moments of glad grace,/ And loved your beauty with love false or true;/ But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.// And bending down beside the glowing bars,/ Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled/ And paced upon the mountains overhead,/ And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

Mature love includes loving yourself through all your days and ways of changing. To truly love, you must know what you love; therefore, you need to know yourself in your changes as well as in your constancy. You do this through quiet reveries, journaling and a willingness to voice your pilgrim soul to others, so they too, can love you on your way.

To love another only as a precious series of snapshots, only during that person’s salad days of careless youth, is not really to love the other, but only their stage of life in its passing. Imagine looking back at your high school yearbook. How many loved you for you and for whom you were becoming? Who cared for you not just in your moments of glad grace, but also in your turbulent times of confused, confounding transformation? Those who did, were your true friends. They are the few to whom you could and hopefully did open your heart. They are the ones through whom and with whom there was heart learning, not to be forgotten, but treasured.