Love and Life
March 21st, 2024 (11 months ago) • 1 minute
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
-- Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Life ebbs and flows in a series of moments and experiences. This passage reminds me that life is not 'life' if you are living in solitude within your comfort zone. Seek out someone to love, someone to express your feeling. Even though love can be painful, it alone can make the impossible possible.
Take risk because that's what life is - full of grey areas and uncertainties. And that's exactly what makes life beautiful.