LOVE'S PRACTICAL LESSON

Life is nothing, if not a practical teacher.
Put your hand on a hot stove and the burn will teach you to never do that again. Take a gravelly corner too fast on your bike and the torn and bruised flesh will leave scars that teach an equally indelible lesson. Exercise too much and too hard before your body is ready and the aching, stiff joints and muscles will be a steady reminder that you made a mistake.
Open your heart to the wrong person and the hurt will teach you to never, ever do that again.
And if you think these valuable lessons are taught only to the young, think again, my friend. Age is not the same as experience, and experience is the great teacher here. You may be young and have lived through enough hurts and painful lessons to be wiser than a less experienced senior citizen. Life is not prejudiced toward the aged, saving all of its wisdom just for them. It hands out these lessons to everyone, regardless of age or sex or background. Rich or poor, educated or not, experience offers lessons that last a lifetime.
Ahh, but that is the rub, isn't it? For someone in the spring of their life, these lessons can be applied for decades. Learn these lessons in the fall of your life, however, and you have but years to reap the benefits. And suffer the aching pain.
So while love is not saved for just the young, neither are the painful benefits of loss and rejection. Love will come when its time is right, not when we expect it. That does not mean our love will be accepted or cherished by the recipient. We may be left standing, our shattered hearts no longer on our sleeves but in pieces in our hands, wondering why it hurts so much and what went to so horribly wrong. And there will be no answers, only loss and emptiness and sadness.
What lessons can be learned from such hurt? What will we take away from this experience?
Most will close off their hearts, locking them behind well-constructed defensive walls, down in cool, damp dungeons, as far from light and life as possible. They will seal their vulnerabilities with a detachment designed to keep the rest of the world, especially those who might just know the key to that dungeon door, at a distance. They will be the people we have met but never really get to know well, for they have been deeply hurt and refuse to suffer such hurt ever again.
Often such defenses are not built on the rocks of a single hurt but on the repeated breeches of our earliest battlements. With every hurt, with every succeeding loss, the injured repeats what soon becomes their mantra: "I will never let that happen again."
Rare is the person who can suffer these repeated losses and rejections and remain open to love and its amazing possibilities. These are resilient souls who have either a masochist's penchant for pain or who simply refuse to give up on the ultimate goal: Finding the love which they (and we all) seek. That they remain open to love does not mean they eventually will find it. Being open to love still means being open to being hurt and rejected. And more pain may be all they will get for being so willing and vulnerable.
But maybe they will get lucky and love will not only find them, but will stay with them for the rest of their lives, no matter how long or short that is.
The rest of us, however, have learned our lesson. And we'll never let that happen again.