All of us will suffer heartbreak.

It’s by design. Our corporeal existence is a frustrating conundrum, a parable of confusion and paradox. We are born to die and there is no love without loss.

Ours is a life that leaves us wanting.

We long for enduring pleasure, a peace without end, a love that does not die. The religious among us will invest in narratives that promise exactly that, albeit after we’re dead. For those that do not believe, stories about the hereafter are pathetic fantasies. Still, many non-believers will endeavor to craft their own earthly utopia, leveraging science and technology with a zealotry that refuses to acknowledge either history or the entropic idiosyncrasies of humanity and physics that will only ever sabotage such projects.

Heartbreak invites us all to a courtship of the fantastic. It’s only a question of which version of the illogical we’ll come to favor.

People on the other side of heartbreak will tell us that things get better, and they do. Time heals all wounds, the old adage goes, but this presupposes one important thing:

Our receptivity to recovery.

Many of us don’t want to heal. Many of us are very invested in the pain of heartbreak. We see our pain as a memorial to what was lost. We see our pain as an opportunity to avoid growth, a proof of our worthlessness. We imagine that our healing is a pointless exercise in vanity, one that defiles the memory of what we had and forces us back into the hard work of enduring this weird, paradoxical existence.

But even if we don’t want to heal, at some point most of us will want to feel better, so we’ll embrace old, familiar patterns, the very ones implicated in our broken heartedness. Because what we know is always far more comfortable than what we don’t.

This leads us to a definition of healing and recovery. For us, healing means growing through our pain into a refined perspective that centers and expands hope.

Hope is the all-important counterbalance to the inevitability of pain and loss. It stands to reason that we should also define hope, and we say that hope is conviction in a discoverable wisdom concealed within every situation and circumstance.

Without hope, we descend into nihilism, losing all interest in growth and wanting only to feel better. We’ll dive right back into our historic, familiar idiocy, maybe with the spicy additions of sex and intoxicants to break our souls entirely.

Unfortunately, too many of us confuse hope with wishful thinking, a desire for things that we like. This is a limited, selfish, and narcissistic understanding of hope that reveals our thinking has not evolved beyond childish egocentrism.

But if we’re ready to move past that and into a cultivation of an edifying hope, if we’re ready to rejoin the maelstrom of human intercourse, if we’re ready to find a way to live despite our pain and the overriding absurdity of existence, then we’ll need to make some important decisions.

Choose Recovery

As a first step, we need to fully embrace the value proposition associated with recovery.

We all need a “why” or there’s no point in getting better. We’re not going to provide a recovery rationale for anybody here, by the way. That’s for each of us to figure out, and this personal deliberation is critical for healing.

Take the time to do that.

Because many of us are not convinced that healing has merit. This may seem ridiculous, but how many of us have written off remarriage after a death or divorce? How many of us have thrown up our hands at the prospect of starting a new project or business after bankruptcy? How many of us have abandoned our creative ambitions after having experienced rejection? How many of us have left our faith and our families after some shameful misstep?

The number of us who refuse to heal because we choose not to see beyond our painful experience is incredible.

We elect stagnation and mediocrity as a balm against future pain. We sabotage our own growth and development to avoid discomfort. We move through the world defensively, scrolling social media feeds as vicarious spectators. We assign our hopes and dreams to a celebrity class and we watch in our pajamas as they are propped up ever higher, only to eventually burn down or disappear.

We take this as proof that we are better off for not trying to live an extraordinary life. But an extraordinary life was never the point.

Choosing to heal means abandoning utopian fantasies and opting to live on life’s strange terms with hope. Choosing to heal means deciding to discover, internalize, and live the wisdom of our circumstances.

But there will never be living without pain.

Recovery is risky. The prospect of a new marriage, a new business, some new creative work- all of it will put the lump back in our throat. There will never be any guarantee that things will be different or better. There is no guarantee against future rejection and loss.

And that’s because a life of hope requires uncertainty.

Choose Acceptance

If bringing hope back into our life makes sense, the next step is a little bit easier.

We need to accept our loss.

We think this is easier because it’s the one piece we likely can’t do much about. There are exceptions. A romantic breakup or a layoff might have us initially bargaining for another shot.

That might be what we actually want, but I doubt it.

I think most of us just want a return to the familiar complacency of a sure thing. We don’t want to work any harder in our relationships and we don’t want to prove to our supervisors what an incredible asset we are. We just want to be delivered as quickly as possibly from the pain and insecurity of our loss.

In any case, the idea that our healing is contingent on the correction of externals is a really bad place to start our recovery. Healing is an inside job.

Refusing to accept our loss is just spinning our wheels and delaying the inevitable. It’s better to take the hit and get to the work of understanding how it all slipped away.

Choose Accountability

But we don’t want just any understanding of our circumstances. We need an understanding that positions us for healing, and the only empowering position is one that lays the responsibility around our loss squarely at our feet.

Good company, wise and grounded, is essential for this step. We don’t need commiseration and enabling. We don’t need people to coddle us while shaking their fists at the sky.

We need people to help us do the work of figuring out how we arrived at this place of loss.

In some situations, this might feel counterintuitive. A young woman loses the love of her life in a terrible car accident. She is now, through no fault of her own, without a husband. Her children are without a father.

How is she in any way accountable?

Did she tell him how much she loved him before he left? Was she in prayer for his safe return? Did she take for granted that their time together would be “forever?” Did she insist on having wills prepared?

She did nothing to cause his death, of course. But what did she do to buffer the devastation of his loss, nay, the inevitability of his loss? How did she step up to mitigate the vacuum of his absence and the effect his death might have on her, her children, and the larger community?

Heartbreak and loss are forgone conclusions. We can absolutely count on both, but still we refuse to factor either into our plans and schemes. As young people, we focus on acquisition, accumulation, and expansion, knowing full well that this period of our lives is the shortest and least certain. And while this optimistic tunnel-vision makes some sense, it is still the case that denial among our youth remains shocking in its pervasiveness.

This is due in large measure to persistent denial among our elders who refuse to frame the inevitability of loss in any convincing or courageous manner.

How many of our elders remain embittered over missed opportunities, financial setbacks, and estranged relationships? How any of our elders grasp at straws to prolong their lives despite advanced infirmity, ignoring the financial and energetic toll this takes on family members?

Healing is generational business. Our descendants suffer immeasurably when we choose not to embrace loss and the rigors of recovery. And as we’ve stated a number of times before, most of us will not.

But let’s say you do. Let’s say you choose recovery. You choose acceptance. You choose accountability.

Then what?

Choose Vigilance

Recovery from loss is a long road. One good day can be followed by a bad month. Or year or decade.

That’s just the way it goes. The loss is on us. The recovery is on us. And the maintenance, for those of us fortunate enough to have grown a bit through it all- that is also on us.

This is the stuff that builds character. This is the crucible wherein magnificent relationships are forged, though they won’t last either. Nothing does.

Setbacks are not an excuse to give up, though. They are an invitation to fine tune our therapeutic regimen, to find better company, to reexamine our mindset and how we are spending our time.

Much of our emotional pain is related to disappointment. Disappointment is a consequence of unrealized expectations. It logically follows that with fewer or more realistic expectations, we are less likely to experience the pain of disappointment, and this is among the many blessings of age and heartbreak.

Disillusionment and serial devastation will eventually temper expectations. We learn over time that the world operates on terms well outside of our utopian ideals. The best of us will continue to dream and aspire and work to make things better, but we’re less invested in outcomes.

We’re more interested in how our hopeful efforts shape us.

Does our work honor the wisdom we acquired when we chose hope through our pain?

Does our work bring us closer to the values that we subscribe to and that we are attracted to in others?

Does our work teach the lessons that we suffered to learn?

For God’s sake, we hope so.

Wishing all a blessed and accepted Ramadan.

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