Life Will Break You

Louise Erdrich expressed this so beautifully in The Painted Drum….

“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 you tasted as many as you could.”

Which just reminds me – life is to be lived and experienced. To its fullest. For that is the art of being human.

Messy. Imperfect. Flawed. Yet, beautiful in that imperfection. If you think about how life is created – it starts with a sweaty passionate mess… and every single person is so unique and intricate – like a mysterious puzzle that takes a lifetime to solve.

Suffice to say, sometimes I’m a mystery even to myself. And so, we all are…