Broken Heart

11 Marbles 
Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.
Jodi Picoult, "My Sister's Keeper"

    As the marbles fall, one by one, I’m taking an inventory of the things that have shifted since that first marble almost a year ago. In L Frank Baum’s classic, the Wizard said, “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable” yet we boldly enter into love with our very impractical hearts.
    When Ex-man moved out 355 marbles ago, I felt like the Tin Woodsman who said to Dorothy as she was leaving, “Now I know I’ve got a heart because it’s breaking.”  I was raw and afraid of what the future would look like without the father of my children and the man I had known since I was a fourteen-year-old girl. (I didn’t know then that I was more like the lion who didn’t know her own courage.)
    Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I had so much difficulty letting go of Ex-man and our relationship. It’s not like the relationship was fabulous but it’s what I knew, and sometimes the relationship devil you know is better than the relationship devil you don’t know. 
    The question that I ponder as I consider entering my future with an open heart is, “What would it take for me to allow people to come and go from my heart and my life with more ease?” and “Why does every parting have to hurt so much?” These seem to be fairly important questions.
    And then there’s that little girl who didn’t like to be left by her friends, who, at times, would try to make them stay with her so she wouldn’t be left, what felt like, alone.  The little girl whose mother tried to explain to her, “You can’t keep someone who wants to leave.” Little did I know that I would be learning that lesson several times in my life until I realized that alone was not a bad place to be - until I learned that I’m pretty good company. 
    As I look back on my life I realize that there have been several times when I’ve thought that someone would be with me forever only to find that in time, our ways parted. Yet with each of these loves, I feel that my life was altered in such a significant way that I can’t imagine not happening upon them in this adventure called life. As Dickens wrote, "Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it." The trick is to keep the heart open with each parting when every instinct cries, “Shut down shop.” Yes, maybe it’s a good idea to pull the shutters and take a pause, but the goal is to show up in the world with an open heart. As the Sufi musician Inayat Khan wrote, ““God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.” (Yes, it's a repeat from a previous marble, but it's one to remember.)  
   
Is it possible that it’s the rigid resistance to life and change that breaks the heart? What would it take to keep the heart open? What would it take to open-heartedly miss an Ex?