Oscar Holzberg
If the heart were to think, it would stand still
© Shingi Rice / Adobe Stock
In the column of our couples therapist Oskar Holzberg, everything revolves around typical love wisdom and its truth content, he dissects proverbs, song lyrics and famous quotes. This time: “If the heart could think, it would stand still”, Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese writer.
In short: And there would be no love affairs.
Now in detail: Why do we like this quote? Why does this sentence seem so true and familiar to us, as if we were meeting an old friend again, even though we are amazed to find that we are meeting him for the first time? The heart is the dwelling place of love. From there, from the heart we are there for each other, let each other go to our hearts and finally give each other our hearts.
But our vital organ and love connect more than sentimental symbolism. Those who live in loving relationships really do have a healthier heart. And hearts do break when relationships are unstable, when they end, or in the loneliness of having no one to turn to. Our heart longs for connection and seeks it for us with all urgency. We had to leave paradise, that was the price we had to pay for our consciousness. We have knowledge, but we no longer live in the self-evident unity with the world. We are painfully aware of this right now. Because we thinking people are doing something that no other living being can do: we are about to destroy the planet without which we cannot exist. This is also a sad expression of our disconnection, which we feel as a deep longing to feel safe and secure.
The love of unreason
Apart from spiritual experience, we seek unity and connection, especially with our love partners. “My home” is a pet name for her in Vietnam. In order to feel at home, we have to engage, let go, entrust ourselves to love and remain faithful to it. Love of all things, the most unreliable feeling under the sun. We have no control over love. We don’t master them, analyze them in vain, don’t understand them. But there is no other way. Who would still dare to love and struggle every day for closeness and connection if they would only follow their reason?
If we allowed the doubts into our hearts, all the questions of right and wrong, the skepticism, the statistics, the critical view of our ideas about love, then our hearts would stop. No, the heart must remain free of it because we must continue to believe in love even if it has just been lost to us. Love is our yes to life, full of naive hope, full of trust in nothing but ourselves. But that’s her forte. If the heart could think, the mind would have conquered everything. We would lose the power of love and lose the courage to follow our feelings.
Love is only in our lives because we rational and planning people allow something completely unreasonable to live on in a part of ourselves. The heart that does not think, but only yearns and feels. That keeps throbbing in the confidence that if we trust it, it’s right and everything will be fine. And when, as a couple, we do everything we can to feel we belong and connect again and again. We must not lose the confidence of love. “Unconsciousness is the foundation of life” is the half-sentence before Pessoa’s famous quote. When we love, we acknowledge that.
