Heart, Body and Soul.

Feeling the need to be understood all the time or making an effort for it is, in my opinion, misguided. It’s like expecting a river to come to a halt so that it can be admired by onlookers. The river is fluid. It can never be understood in its entirety nor does it have that need. It will still end up in the sea, regardless.

Yes, along the way people will take away from the river, and yes, the river will give parts of itself willingly too, but it must never stop. It must keep flowing because its true destination is to become one with the sea. The river will lose a lot along the way. Gain a lot too. Erode all that it comes in contact with, sometimes erasing it and other times, making it more beautiful. But that is the price river pays to find its flow and then to eventually enter the sea where it will lose its identity but in return it will find its truth. And if it isn’t obsessed with its identity or or its past, it will become the sea itself.

The point of this analogy is that our existence is like that of a river and its eventual destination is death. The soul is what directs the main course of the river. From the point it springs to the point where it ends up in the sea. Our heart and our body, dictate the river’s path in between. The waterfalls. The meanders. The beautiful gorges. And everything in between.

We, as humans, tend to get bogged down by our physical needs or by what our heart wants. Our physical needs and what our hearts want, although, are internal to us and therefore, should be respected; they do not make up the entirety of our existence. We sometimes forget that. And so it goes completely unnoticed when they are in direct conflict with our soul. When that happens, soul should take precedence over all else.

This by no means diminishes the role that our heart and our body play in defining our existence. For it’s the heart and our pursuit of our physical needs is what gives our soul its unique path, otherwise it would be as if the river fell into the sea in a straight line. It just wouldn’t be as beautiful or unique. Also, if we were to deny the body and the heart, we would never truly understand our own resilience, creativity, imagination, gratitude and all the other qualities that makes us human. There is a reason God trapped our souls in our bodies. To deny matters of body and heart completely, would be to deny our own humanity.