Maybe Our Hearts Aren’t Breakable, Just Flexible

Maybe we have the concept of heartbreak all wrong. Maybe it’s not that our hearts are breakable, maybe it’s that they are flexible – and sometimes we need to stretch.

Stretching is a form of physical exercise in which a specific muscle or tendon (or muscle group) is deliberately flexed or stretched in order to improve the muscle’s felt elasticity and achieve comfortable muscle tone. The result is a feeling of increased muscle control, flexibility, and range of motion. Stretching is also used therapeutically to alleviate cramps.

Maybe that’s the key to understanding heartbreak – we’re not breaking, we’re just stretching. We’re improving our comfort, our control, and our range of motion and emotion. Maybe we have to remember that when we’re reeling from a love that has been lost. Maybe that’s what we must hold onto when we’re grieving and when it seems as if the pain in our chest will kill us once and for all.

Maybe it’s not a break, after all.

Maybe the feeling that makes our breath catch and our insides hurt is the feeling of flexibility, of stretching, of expansion. Perhaps that’s how we make room for love, light, happiness, and joy. Perhaps that’s how we make a home in our heart for all the people that we love.

Perhaps.

Perhaps the feeling that we call heartbreak is our soul stretching. And when we stretch, we let our hearts flex and fill with more love. In that moment of stretching, we instantly know more about love – we know how much we have to give, and we know how much we need, too.

Perhaps the feeling that we call heartbreak is how we know we’re growing. It’s how we know we’re living. It’s how we make room to love even more than we did before.

Perhaps at that moment that we like to call heartbreak, we expand to let love fill us. And just because we got disappointed, or hurt, or sad, it doesn’t mean that we’re broken. Maybe it just means that the compartments of our heart are stretching so that we can continue to let love in.

Maybe it’s not about heartbreak at all, maybe it’s about heart growth.

Maybe.