Flying in from Chicago, Omaha seems like a sleepy little cow town. Driving in from a long day’s trip from Wyoming through western Nebraska, Omaha seems like a metropolis.
Emotions are like this too. They aren’t just an isolated points of data. They live on a trajectory. The origin and direction of that trajectory often defines what an emotion is all about.
Heartbreak is like that.
Consider seeing an old friend sitting on a park bench, his eyes red, his face slack, looking off into the distance. When you walk up to him and ask him how he’s doing, he takes just a second too long to compose his face into the expected smile and say, “I’m doing great.”
You might conclude that he’s feeling sad. But then, when you follow up, saying, “No, really. Are you okay?” he breaks. “I’m not okay,” he admits. He tells you that his wife of 20 years has asked for a trial separation. There’s been no cheating, no abuse or anything like that. “She says that she still cares for me, but she says she’s not in love with me anymore. She says she’s not sure she ever really was.”
Your friend is not sad. Your friend is heartbroken. He has plummeted from a high plateau of affection, security, and self-regard into a pit of isolation, alienation, and a shattered identity. Heartbreak is an emotion you can only feel after believing that you never would.
It’s feels great to consider the many forms of love, which is why movie theaters are filled with romantic comedies where it all works out in the end. The trouble is that it often doesn’t work out in the end. Love can seem to be going great, until you find out that what you thought was going on wasn’t.
Most of the people who talk about heartbreak are writers and musicians, talking about where they find their inspiration for work that’s emotionally compelling. As the practitioners of kintsukuroi know, it’s when things are broken that we encounter a special opportunity to achieve something even more beautiful than what we have lost.
That’s not heartbreak, though. That comes after heartbreak.
Heartbreak is being down in the pit, not seeing any way of ever getting out.
