Love anything

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or 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. To love is to be vulnerable.

~ C.S. Lewis

Recently someone sent me this poem from C.S.Lewis. When I first read it I felt uneasy about it. I could not understand the point of the poem. And then I saw the reason…

For Lewis love means opening our hearts to pain and sorrow. He sees the vulnerability of love as something negative, something to be avoided. Being vulnerable is the whole point of loving!

Loving, truly loving, is a deep connection in which you put yourself out in the open.

The only alternative is to live without love; to be alone forever.

Deep down though everyone of us knows that we were not born to be alone, everyone seeks connection.

This poem made me reflect on my work though. Over the years I have always tried to work for clients I can relate to, clients that at some level I had a connection to. People I could be vulnerable around and give them my true self. Only that way I am capable of doing honest work, provide the best service money can buy.

If I’d hide my vulnerability away I would become a soulless creature in my emotional life and a worse professional for it.

I reject that life that is no life!