Letting our hearts break

Normalize getting choked up over car commercials and snowfall

My mom is moved to tears by the first snowfall of the season, every year. It’s a subtle and quiet moment that would be easy to miss. There’s no sobbing, not even an actual tear on the move down a cheek. But if you’re watching closely, you’ll just notice the slight welling up in her eyes and tightness in her throat, the evidence of a building wistfulness that she attempts to swallow as she moves about the house, pausing every so often at a pane of glass to take it all in. She’s never really acknowledged this, or shared what it is exactly that moves her about this annual moment, but she doesn’t have to. I know. Maybe you know, too.

These are the genes from which I am built. And that’s precisely where this experience springs from, after all. It’s not a response born from a conscious reflection. It’s an immediate joining of every cell swelling individually all at once, every time the underdog wins gold, the glittering Milky Way sprawls across the dome of the night sky, the first snowflakes begin to gather in a soft blanket over frozen branches, or someone dear is tightly hugged goodbye. A compulsory and often even surprising surge of sensation gaining speed and intensity as it lurches from mitochondria to the back of the throat where it makes itself known and then rises upward, pooling in the eyes and out into the world.

My mom’s brother used to develop exceptionally watery eyes within a few moments of being overtaken by laughter — the kind of laughter that hollers and infects the whole room, the kind where whatever was funny is lost entirely as the chorus of laughter is now of and at and for the laughter itself. He was excellent at laughing. And the experience visibly moved his cells to tears — literal tears of joy.

My cousins and I named this bodily response that we share “The Allen Tear Ducts”, an unfortunate hereditary condition that would cause the afflicted subject to weep involuntarily over car commercials and looking around the room while in the company of a rare collection of treasured friends or family and at the sign that hangs over the arrivals gate at Logan airport that says “welcome home” and the sight of the Christmas tree silently pouring gold across the room on a quiet winter night.

But it’s not really weeping. In fact it’s not even sadness. Or maybe it is, sometimes. But it more so seems to me to be a byproduct of a world too beautiful and heartbreaking to possibly ever attempt to contain coming into screaming, electric contact with the soft and sensitive nervous system of an animate body attuned to the excruciating details of life.

It is the feeling tone of paying attention. A surge of raw emotion itself, a nameless conglomerate of nostalgia and compassion and longing and joy and gratitude and grief that converges at the sight of geese soaring in perfect formation against a low autumn sun and the beginning hums of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” that played over dinner in my childhood home and in the car that I drove alone with a trunkful of belongings across the country to a new life in the Rocky Mountains when I was 21.

And as I climbed from the foothills into the rugged and towering peaks for the first time, carefully navigating the winding I-70, my eyes were pulled upward, spellbound by features of this earth I have never seen anything like before, tears streaming down my face as I smiled and snorted and laughed at the terror of the adventure I was beginning all alone and the magnitude of the mountains that quietly assured me I wasn’t alone at all.

Trees in Winter by George H. Hallowell

This condition is frustrating not just in its spontaneity and tendency to fully overwhelm, but in its complete inability to be captured by language. An ironic circumstance of literally not being able to speak because of the life-sized lump suddenly lodged in our throat and not being to adequately communicate why. Our clunky words have no way to create form from this nebulous internal force and sufficiently communicate to others, or even often to ourselves, what it is exactly that our very being is sensing and responding to. But still somehow, maybe you know.

Maybe you also know, as I do, the impulse to attempt to swallow and shoo it away as quickly as possible. We barely know what to do with one emotion when it presents itself softly, so it tracks that we tend to be blindsided and uneasy when they all show up together in a potent cocktail that springs from the architecture of life itself, inconveniently tightening around our throat and building in our eyes when we’re just trying to get to work or express thanks or get some fresh air.

But I have found that attempting to armor against this sensitivity is to armor against existence itself. To turn a blind cheek to the heart wrenching minutiae of experience is a one way ticket to a cold and flat wasteland of indifference where the impulses of our atoms themselves are ignored in favor of a socially acceptable ferris wheel of fear masquerading as hollow distraction.

It’s a fear of life itself that keeps us at this distance, or even maybe of death. A fear of reaching out and touching the soft human core that sustains us, of looking too closely at something we both love beyond words and live in constant terror will be ripped away from us at any moment.

To guard against these fears is a mistake.

Our pieces, from our sense organs down to the genes embedded in our DNA, do not combine to comprise some walled off separate entity moving through an outside world we just happen to find ourselves in — we are porous, aware organisms involved in countless levels of exchange between our breathing bodies and the environments that we not only inhabit, but that literally shaped and built our very organs and intellect themselves.

We are permeable manifestations of the soil and mountains, alive and vulnerable iterations of our ancestors and the eons of coincidence and history that brought us to this very moment, and sometimes when we catch glimpses our infuriatingly defenseless place within this immensity and the myriad ways it all could have been something else entirely, and the reality that it all will be some other way very soon, our heart breaks for all of it.

Credit unknown

I still feel the instinct to shut the door on these moments, to harden to the flood of feeling spurred by something seemingly small or silly, to snap my attention back to whatever the circumstances suggest is more important or relevant. But more and more I’m finding that I’m inclined to hold the door open and invite the rising waters of recognition to swirl and rage and swell, bursting my heart open, slowly softening my edges as it storms through me, pooling quietly in my totemic tear ducts.

This sensitivity isn’t a weakness, it is a portal to awakening.

Its a gateway that looks like the season’s first snowflakes wrapping the earth in the sparkling cloak of winter and feels like laughing so hard your face hurts, everything significant and infinite in this life colliding with each alert and ancient atom within the finitude of your flesh.

This is what it is to be alive.

Let your heart break.

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