Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, a… - David Whyte

You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.

We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.