The world is not always the easiest place to be in. People can and will hurt you. People do and will suffer from injustice. Innocent lives are taken. Things may not always go your way. You will lose people and things.
So then it can become very difficult to have any love, desire or fondness towards the world and life. And because sometimes it’s so hard to bear and accept it all, people choose to go into protection mode. They harden their hearts. They become cynical and lose hope. They withdraw themselves from the world and people. By hardening the heart, they decide to not FEEL anymore. Because feeling becomes very tiring after a while.
But the heart was not designed to be hardened. Because at the end of it all, whatever is felt but not accepted, causes discomfort in other ways. For example, a person might often be depressed and sad. A person withdrawing from others will suffer from the loneliness - they’ll become snappy and angry on a daily basis. But who does it affect at the end of the day? Only the person who has hardened their own heart. It’s like drinking poison and expecting the other to die. By hardening the heart, one misses out on life’s good parts and stops living.
Heard of the phrase ‘hurt people, hurt people’? That’s because their hearts are too hardened to even feel compassion for others, but all the suppressed feelings still need a place to go. So they hurt and project on others.
Hardening the heart isn’t a wise option. Instead, we have to turn that anger and hurt into compassion and wisdom. The anger should be used constructively. If you were hurt, how might you help others from what you have learned? How might you, from your own experience of pain, support others with theirs?