One of the symptoms of keeping an open heart is that I need to carry tissues wherever I go. “Your father is a crier” I remember hearing my mother say. I think she wanted to reassure me that when I saw my father tearing up I need not worry, there wasn’t anything wrong, he was just an emotionally expressive man. His father was the same, and it was very clear from an early age that I would be too.
As a child, my tears would come at quite inconvenient moments: while trying to speak in front of my classmates, while trying to stand up for myself when in trouble with a teacher, while trying to explain the emotions I was feeling to my parents. They were tears of embarrassment, of emotional overwhelm, tears that showed up because I was a sensitive child who was learning to regulate a very finely tuned nervous system.
In my teenage years, as I began to open my heart beyond my own experiences and towards the world that was unfolding around me, my emotional life turned its attention towards social and political issues of justice and humanity. My tears were now activated by the strife and suffering I was becoming aware of. My open heart led me to take up an activist stance against racism, capitalism, and militarism. The sensitive child became a serious adolescent. No longer embarrassed about speaking up in class, no longer shy to stand up for things I believed in, my open heart gave me righteousness, gave me courage, gave me clarity around with whom I would stand and with which values I would center myself.
My open heart continued to guide me into adulthood and was central to the choices I would make: to continue centering the values of love and justice, to dedicate my time and energy to social and political causes, to pursue work that was aligned with those values and maintain a clarity around what compromises I would and would not make.
Eventually my open heart would lead me to the primary guiding principle of my life: that nobody is disposable, that every single one of us human beings has the same inherent value, and that any assumption that holds one person’s value over another is an assumption that needs to be challenged.
This principle, that demands that we see all of humanity as one big community, perhaps even one singular organism on this planet has had two significant implications in my life. The first is that it demands that my heart open not only to the people with whom I find resonance, shared values, and common cause, but also to the plight of the people with whom I do not agree, the people who actively oppose all that I stand for, even the people who in their rhetoric, assumptions, and actions seek to undermine my own and other people’s existence. It does not ask me to accept their claims, legitimize their beliefs, or hold my tongue in the face of ideas I think are dangerous. But it does demand that I not throw these people away, even if they do not feel the same about me.
I have to admit that this is sometimes a challenge, that there are times that I would prefer to close my heart, to draw a hard line around who’s humanity I want to consider, to do some good old disposing of my own. But when it comes down to it, the choice to keep my heart open, the sense of clarity and emotional regulation that comes with being in integrity with this value, continues to outweigh the momentary comfort that sinking into my righteous indignation would give me.
The second implication of keeping my heart so open is that my tears now show up in the strangest of places: essentially anytime I see people working together. I will cry while watching a sporting event, not because of an outcome, but if I see a particular moment of a team coming together to cheer each other on. I will cry while watching an action movie when the music is just right and the team is coming together to take on a common foe.
But I also cry at the opposite: when I see people not able to come together, not able to put aside their differences for the sake of something bigger than themselves. My open heart breaks when I see people continuing to cause each other harm because they cannot put down the hurt that they feel. And my open heart allows me to sit in the paradox of their competing realities, it allows me to sit with each of these people, to empathize with each of their perspectives, to have compassion for each of their stories, to cry with each of them for the pain that they feel.
I am a crier, like my father before me, like his father before him. It is a side effect of keeping an open heart, and it is one that I wear as a badge of honor.