Do or drown in torpor

Recently in a conversation I was having with a friend, an interesting concept came up. We were talking about happiness and art, and inevitably the conversation had turned to relationships at one point. She suggested that people basically have two options - the first means closing yourself up a little bit, putting up guards and never really giving yourself up to another person. In doing this it's possible that you'll be hurt less, you'll be happier overall and you'll live life with just a little bit less pain that people who choose differently. You can be successful, and happy, and normal and calculated and organized and just in general lead a good safe life. The second option, is to open yourself up, and give all your heart and soul to someone else, to multiple "someone else"s, and to live in that sort of release. You'll be more free and open and when you're happy and in love life will seem perfect and beautiful. But then, of course, not everything lasts forever, and you'll eventually face the crushing feeling of getting your heart broken. It happens to everyone, I suppose, but when you've opened yourself up that much you don't have the same barriers. So what can you do? You can suffer and you can cry and you can fall into a state of depression and disgust for a time, meet someone else, patch yourself up and start all over again. Or, you can choose to put up barriers and move over to the other side, and live an easier more safe life.

Now it seems like it's really a decision based on what kind of a person you are. The silly, artistic romantic type people will inevitably keep their guards down and go on loving with all they have, getting hurt time and time again. It's true, because you can see it in art itself. Really great art, stuff that actually makes you feel something real and physical just by seeing, reading or hearing it comes from that suffering, whether it comes from love or loss or sickness or death or anything like that, it comes from those who have their barriers down, because as much as those barriers keep things out, they also have a way of keeping the product of pain and suffering and love and hate and triumph and shame in, the sound and the colour and the motion and the texture and the fury and the succor. The same barriers people put up to keep the ugly things out also have a way of keeping the beautiful things in.

I don't mean to say that one of these decisions is the right one and one is the wrong one. I'm just saying that when I see people who've been hurt lock themselves up like that it's easy to see the art in their eyes waiting to get out, and it never does. So they turn and try to be free in other senses, they fill that void for a time with whatever it is that they think will fill it. And hey, maybe it will. Maybe that's what they need. And maybe one day they will let those barriers down and we might get a chance to see for ourselves what they're capable of, but that's for them to decide when and where it will happen.

It just sucks is all. If more people would open up and let themselves feel a little more, the world might be a little bit prettier, I think.

Then again I can't say I blame people for not wanting to get hurt again.