“You are here to risk your heart.”
“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.”
~ Louise Erdich, The Painted Drum
We do lots of things that don’t matter. We spend lots of busy time on things that are forgotten the next day. We accumulate lots of things, go to lunches, take meetings. None of that matters. Why are we here? What will make us happy? To feel, to give, to love: to risk our hearts.
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