Watching Firework, Feeling Nothing

Ram Dass once wrote,

“At her bedside, I learned to keep my heart open, even when it was breaking.”

In a few days, the sky will fill with fireworks.

Gatherings and grills and music.

Kids with sparklers.

A whole country trying, desperately, to celebrate.

And somewhere in the middle of it,

you may notice a strange distance in yourself.

Smiling at the right moments.

Saying the right things.

Feeling, underneath it all,

a little far away.

Like you are watching the celebration through glass.

If that is you this weekend,

nothing is wrong with you.

It may just be that somewhere in the past few years,

without ever deciding to,

you learned how to feel less.

Nobody taught you.

You just learned.

You learned to read a terrible headline

and keep eating your breakfast.

You learned to watch a city fill with rage and pain,

and check the weather next.

You learned to hear hard news from someone you love

and feel the feeling arriving muffled,

like sound through water.

Ram Dass might call this

the closing of the heart.

And you did not do it because you are cold. Of course not.

You did it because you are human,

and the world keeps asking your heart

to hold more than any heart was built to hold all at once.

Another war.

Another feed.

Another thing we cannot fix

and cannot stop knowing about.

So you started rationing.

A little numbness in the morning,

so you can work.

A little distance at dinner,

so you can be pleasant.

Scroll past the suffering,

so you can sleep.

For a while, it works.

Then one night, you catch it.

You feel nothing at news that should break you,

and a quiet voice asks,

What is happening to me?

Then comes the guilt,

Then the exhaustion from the guilt.

Then the scroll again,

because at least it is something.

This is the bind so many of us are living inside right now:

Feel everything and drown.

Feel nothing and disappear.

Two doors.

Both of them losses.

But Ram Dass was pointing at a third door.

He found it in the hardest room of his life,

sitting beside someone he could not save.

And, once you see it,

you cannot unsee it.

Not feeling everything.

Not feeling nothing.

Staying open without being destroyed.

The third door is this: