Heart or brain

sweetlilah2-2T

If creator asked me, however creation occurs, would I like to be a heart or a brain, without hesitation my answer would be a heart. It’s not that I have anything against a brain, it’s just that hearts have more fun, more of a wild life-ride.

My cousin married on the weekend while her father lay dying in his bed. That cements my heart choice.

Weddings and watching someone you love die can be highly emotional. Weddings for the glorious euphoria where it can feel as though you’re in some kind of mooshy bubble soaked in joy on steroids. Everyone revels inside the protective sac, shielded from harsh realities, whether you’re the bride, groom or guest. You can forget at a wedding, leave everything outside to be in the deity of the day.

Watching someone die, which is very different to death, takes you to a whole other extreme where torment exceeds pain to induce an excruciating helplessness. Being out in cyclonic seas that regurgitate scrambled eggs in one dip would be far simpler than riding the tumult of emotion in dying. Watching those you love, watch their dearest fade away adds a whole other layer in the scuttle to catch breaking hearts that drip through your fingers.

The two together, a wedding and dying, become a whammy of intensities. Extremes escalate as the bubble suddenly hosts the world’s scariest roller coaster to flip revellers over and over, manoeuvring double corkscrews and cobra rolls in the dark while dodging shooting, zephyring sparks that ricochet inside the bubble. Sudden moves exaggerate and juxtapose happiness and hurt and confrontations can bite in as the antithesis of pleasure and heartache.

And yet being in that bubble holds the nurture and care to get through, to nourish the ache that transcend all other aches and comes from a bed of barren more mangled than a thousand, old gnarled trunks entwining as taught rope, all pulling as tourniquets on everything within scent and sight.

Of course, a heart must be stripped bare to feel, to attune to the spiralling emotions and slivers of tenderness, to accept without question and give an ease of friendship and support while taking care of one’s own needs ... it’s the essence of giving without any expectation.

An open heart delights in the greatest sprouting, boundless and enriching. It comes with sacrifice and compromise, of hidden tears and no judgement.

It comes with patience. And genuine kindness.

And allows the whole gamut of everything to flow free, with no boundaries or barriers. Pain easily enters and you’re exposed to the bottomless swirl of eruptions without restraint, fighting uncontrollable and unreasonable as the ones you care about or love the most are the ones that will make you cry. It’s a pain that can’t be touched or pinpointed.

An open heart can grip without warning and lock in as a monolithic stronghold rooted from sky to earth. And yet it’s that grounding that sanctions an experiencing of vastness and to take risks, to be caught in a safety net when falling.

Sometimes you might wonder whether life would be easier by simply closing one’s heart, boarding it up to protect from all and everything. And yet the energy it takes to be closed can far exceed the energy for uncovering, to be oneself without hiding. Sometimes the fear of being hurt is more painful than being hurt.

The alternative of living with a closed heart, afraid to chance, to live in a lingering starkness where loneliness can reverberate in a wallowing chortle of superficial fluff, desolate, confused in the staccato of dark, fatigued and impervious to feel all that life is … no, that’s not for me. That’s not life.

I’d prefer to wear the silky lingerie that catches on jagged cliff faces, confident of the buoyancy from those around me as we bounce in and out of our bubble.

Opening up is an endorphic lift that sucks in the bubble bliss and pitted sadness and digests it, processes it into a deep understanding of the polarity of life and an ultimate gratitude for it. An open heart accentuates the happiness and knows empathy, especially for the closed hearts.

It's a nunu kiss of true, deep and honouring love that shines past the deepest and darkest. It’s the kind of kiss a grandparent plants on the forehead of a grandchild where nothing else matters but the kiss.

What would you prefer if the offer was presented to you, to be a heart or a brain?