Bracing Embracing

Most of us are bracing the heart and have been doing it so long we have stopped feeling the brace at all, the way you stop feeling a held breath once the holding becomes the shape of the body itself. Some pain arrived early, before there were words for it, and the body did what a body does and closed around the hurt to keep it from widening, and the chest drew in, and the breath stopped travelling all the way down, and somewhere in the years that followed we began to call this protecting ourselves, and we called it that so faithfully and for so long that it came to feel like strength.

For men the closing comes earlier still, and we are praised as it happens. The boy falls and is told not to cry, reaches for comfort and is told to harden, and learns before he can name the lesson that the open heart is the dangerous one, that a man is something you build by setting the chest like a wall and standing behind it, and he carries that wall out of childhood and into the marriage and into the work and into the room where his own child reaches for him and finds a father who flinched from his own softness so long ago he can no longer feel where it went.

Notice the two words. Bracing. Embracing. The same arms, the same gathering motion of the body, one of them closing around the wound to keep the world out and the other opening around it to take the world in, and a whole life turning quietly on which way the arms have learned to move. The world asks for both, and on this journey- true potency comes from embracing your bracing.

The sun does not brace. It pours across the whole earth and asks for nothing back, too bright some days and hidden behind cloud on others but always giving and never once shielding itself from the giving, and this is the thing the heart was made for and the thing we forgot it was made for when we began to guard it as though it were a finite thing that emptied a little more each time it opened.

A closed heart does not stop hurting. The ache stays. It only loses the one thing it needed, which was somewhere to go, and so it begins to circle, the same narrow circle year after year, and the man behind the wall mistakes the wall for the thing keeping the wound from worsening when the wall is the reason the wound has never once been allowed to close.

There is another way to meet what arrives and it asks more of us than the bracing ever did, which is why so few of us ever find it, and it has nothing to do with getting rid of the pain. It is the willingness to let the pain travel further in, to take the ache already living up near the throat and let it fall past the place where the body has been catching it for thirty years, down into the deeper water underneath.

This is not a technique and there is nothing in it to perform. Its closer to a letting go than to anything that could be called doing, the way the body finally surrenders a breath it held so long it forgot the breath was being held, and for a man who has spent his life doing this is the harder thing by far, because here there is nothing to do and nothing to win and no one watching, only the willingness to stop bracing and let the arms turn the other way.

What comes then is not always relief, and the comfortable version of this leaves that part out. Sometimes the ache reaches the deep water and dissolves and something clenched since boyhood quietly lets go, and sometimes it does not dissolve at all but sinks the way a seed sinks into soil and stays there working, slow, becoming something you cannot name yet and will not see the shape of for years, and you do not get to choose which, you only get to stop guarding the ground where the seed would fall.

Peace was never the far thing, the thing you reach by closing off and going quiet somewhere away from your life. It was the water the whole time, underneath the bracing, the still ground your life has been happening against without your knowing. The heart does not open to escape what it carries. It opens because that is the only place the carrying has ever had to go.

So the next time you feel likes bracing, before protection, feel for the place where the breath stops on the way down. You closed it so long ago you forgot, now its time to breathe slowly, and drop the edge of the world into the depth of your heart.