On love

Sing
With your head up
With your eyes closed
Not because you love the song
Because you love to sing
Because you love to sing

I looked forward to going to work today. I felt that I needed its routine to stabilize my emotions, and distract me from my scattered, pessimistic thoughts. In the office, I am efficient, controlled, and pleasant, which really might be the best version of myself. It's the me I'm unashamed of, that I wish I was all the time.

I can't be hurt that badly at work, because I never show my ugly face. If I'm not loved here, who cares? My co-workers don't know me at my worst.

To be unknown and unloved is tolerable, as long as at least one person knows and loves you. To be loved, but unknown, is unbearably awkward and creepy (stalkers, anyone?). But to be known and unloved - this is how hearts are broken.

We might be safe in the office, and without much effort. But families, friendships, romances, marriages - it takes a perpetual campaign of hard-heartedness to be safe in these territories. I believe that failure and pain are inevitable in the relationships that we idealize the most, but for me this has been one of life's most difficult pills to swallow. We will never be fully, perfectly loved by anyone, except for God. And how are we to negotiate how much pain we can take?

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
- C.S. Lewis

I'm not yet in danger of locking my heart away. Still, my heart's constant nagging wears me out. "Look at me. Notice me, all of me, and love me. Love me because of what you see, and in spite of what you see." This is what my heart demands of the people who are close to me, yet I so infrequently do the same for them.

Maybe I need to learn to love loving more, because it is what my Father does. He does not love me because I am lovable, but because he loves. He sings, even if the song is awful, because he loves to sing, and he loves the songwriter. He reaches down to infuse our crappy lives with his voice, though we may never stop to hear.