To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. –C. S. Lewis
Children all over the country have gone back to school. Parents, caretakers, and grandparents hand them off to bus drivers and teachers, who take them in all new-clothes-shiny and weighted down with gargantuan backpacks stuffed with a year’s supply of crayons, tissues boxes, and hope.
But oh the vulnerability on the faces of all! Children entering new classrooms with new teachers, new classmates, new routines. And those left behind in the parking lots who watch until they can’t see the backs of those they’ve so lovingly offered.
Just yesterday, I entered the office of an elementary school I’m working with and saw a second grade boy, his hand to his ear, crying that he didn’t feel good and wanted to go home. Alone, without his mother or teacher, he stood before the school secretary, wholly vulnerable to whatever would come next. I cringed. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. If I could have scooped him and taken him home, I would have, for in that moment, I saw all of us–the boy, my children, my grandchildren, myself–breakable, penetrable, and vulnerable.
In his novel, Atonement, Ian McEwan writes:
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Here was a child, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended. This awareness is both buoying and terrifying. For some, such fragility prompts tender responses; for others, nothing but meanness. Vulnerability is that space where possibilities of tenderness and meanness hang in the balance.
There are many photos of my grandson, Griffin, that unsettle me. Often he is unwilling to be photographed, hiding behind his sister, pets, costumes, and available furniture or trees. Two years ago when I asked my daughter to take a picture of my husband, me, Gracyn, and Griffin for our family Christmas card, she could never get a single shot of Griffin looking directly at the camera and smiling. Ultimately, she resorted to photoshop, artfully piecing together his torso and head from other more successful photos. The fact that Griff lacked an arm in the final photo (hidden, blessedly by my jean jacket) was yet another casualty of photographing one who often regards the camera as something that might penetrate and break his very soul.
Dr. Brené Brown, researcher professor at the University of Houston, has spent the last ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Her TED talks are some of the most viewed, and her visits to popular talk shows are widely anticipated. Brown has much to say about vulnerability. As a result of her research, she claims that the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s like inviting disaster.
This is the look I often see on my grandson’s face when he is in the presence of others who wait for his joyous reaction to something. He turns away or scowls. He defies joy to flood his face. He refuses to be happy–at least while others are watching. I have seen this response from countless others who, too, fear inviting disaster. Truthfully, I have responded in a similar, albeit more adult, way. I recall sitting on the back of a convertible that was slowly making its way around the football field during the halftime of the my college homecoming game. As queen, I was crowned and cloaked, taking my celebratory ride. But not even half way around the track, I remember thinking, I’d better not get too excited about this because tomorrow will be just another day. Tomorrow, I will just be me. Brown’s claims ring true for me: there have been many times when I have personally suffered from a low tolerance for vulnerability, preferring instead to cocoon myself in self-talk designed to ward off disaster.
Brown’s work with vulnerability has struck a nerve with many. Her TED talks are some of the most watched, and her books are best-selling. When she speaks about our collective issues with vulnerability, people are listening:
Society has taught us that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness—but it’s just the opposite. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes. There’s not a single act of courage that doesn’t involve vulnerability.
Like Griffin, I have feared uncertain outcomes. But being seen by others? This is often just too much. I wouldn’t go bowling with friends in high school and college because I would be seen at something I wasn’t good at and the outcome was, indeed, uncertain. Bowling in public would have been an act of vulnerability. And courage.
Author Madeleine L’Engle writes that children often think that when they grow up, they will no longer be vulnerable. She concludes, however, that to grow up is to accept vulnerability. . .To be alive is to be vulnerable. As I consider the little boy who cried in his school office on the first day of school, I can imagine well-meaning adults who might confidently assure him that he would grow out of this vulnerability, that he would grow up and leave these feelings of helplessness and fear behind him. And herein lies the real truth of vulnerability: we simply don’t have the stomach for it. We can’t bear to see or feel it, to relive it through our children, to own it.
As daunting as the challenges of vulnerability are, though, Brown offers positive words:
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
Most of us would argue that we would never give up on love, belonging, and joy, and yet, at times, most of us have. We have run from people and situations that expose and threaten to undo us. Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, we slip behind our selves to prepare faces to meet the faces we will meet.
Still, when I see the sweet vulnerability of my grandchildren–of children in general–like Brown, I feel the urgency to help them embrace it. For it is in this very embrace that their courage will grow an abundant life marked with love, acceptance, and joy.
If you’d like to listen to Brown, check out her TED talk below.
