Pain in My Heart

I love Otis Redding, and about a week ago, my ipod shuffled onto this song. It's been with me ever since:

Pain in my heart
Is treating me cold
Where can my baby be?
Lord, no one knows

Pain in my heart
Just won't let me sleep
Where can my baby be?
Lord, where can she be?

And now the days has begin to get tough
Said, I want you to come back
Come back, come back, baby
I had enough, oh

A little pain in my heart
Just won't let me be
Wake up restless nights
Lord and I can't even sleep

I'm with Otis -- this lack of sleep business is one of the worst parts of what I'm going through right now.

Ever since I heard this song the other day, I've been tasking myself: what, exactly, is this pain in my heart? I've tried to explain it, to myself, to my man, to my friends, to my children, to my mom, but none of the explanations have really been satisfactory.

Of course it's human nature to not want to hurt:

Yeah
Stop this little pain in my heart

And certainly, as I've expressed multiple times in this space, I've got this desire going on, just like Otis:

And now the days has begin to get rough
Said I want you to love me
Love me, love me, baby
Till I get enough, oh

But if what my boyfriend says is true, that he does loves me, wicked, then maybe this pain in my heart is just here to teach me something. To soften me. To make me more tolerant, more compassionate, more loving. To help me continue to learn to trust in love and goodness, rather than giving in to fear and lack. To learn that if  I am seeking to "get enough" by being loved by another human being, I'll always come up short. I'll always be disappointed.

Because the feeling that one has enough comes from a place inside -- it's not something that can be taken in from the outside. I'll be the first to admit that it can be confusing when love from the outside comes in such an amazing package, as it does with my man. You just want to hold on to it. You want to hold on really tight, to minimize the possibility that you'll lose it, and to maximize those incredible feelings that come when such a bundle of goodness loves you up. But if I learned anything in my marriage, it is that we human beings need to feel that we have some space, even or especially in love, so that we can continue to evolve into the best possible form of ourselves, because that's how we're able to best serve the world.

And so I'm working on making friends with this...

Pain in my heart
Little pain in my heart

...because I reckon it's really just the pain we all have as humans. Separation in necessary and natural sometimes, and the more we can just let it be there, and trust that the love we put out into the world always comes back, the more we can rest our weary heads and find peace.