Sometimes I am heartsick in the way of the mind. A year ago my heart was literally sick, they stopped it took it out and refurbished it. Sometimes the things people do to one another make me heartsick. To be heartsick means to be severely depressed or unhappy. There is a physical component to being heartsick, it feels as if your heart is sinking down into your stomach, a great deflation of the spirit and soul, like wandering through a black cloud with no light, a kind of emotional nausea.

I was heartsick today. And then I remembered how not to be heartsick.

When I was 14 and in great trouble, I wandered into a Quaker Meeting in Providence, R.I. It was the first place in my life where I felt completely safe and very welcome. It was as if they knew me and liked me there. I felt as if I had come home. I kept coming. No one bothered me much, but one day, a year or so after my first visit, I had an awful time. I came to Meeting as I had been doing faithfully.  I sat looking miserable, I might have been crying, I’m sure I was, but I don’t remember.

An older man, an Overseer in the meeting, came and sat by my side and touched my shoulder. He had smiled at me before, but we had never spoken. The Quakers were like that, they seemed to know when you wanted to talk or needed to and when you didn’t.

Could he help?, he asked. He said I looked heartsick. I was, I said, I told him some of the things that had been done to me that had made me so sick and frightened and sad. I told him how angry I was.

He said he had an idea for me. He said when people do things that make you heartsick, you have to do one of the most difficult things people are ever asked to do. You have to put yourself in their  shoes, see the world through their eyes. Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing, he said.

People will rationalize doing the most brutal and vicious things to one another, and then congratulate themselves on their courage and virtue. History is full of such things, he said, just think of holocausts and genocide. Wars happen when we can’t see through the eyes of others, when we dismiss them as being so horrible that they can be hated and killed.

If you hate someone, it’s likely they hate you as much or more. Hatred will make you heartsick. In a heartbeat, he said, winking.

Remember that everyone loves someone, he said. They are heartsick when they lose a love one, no matter what they have done. There is always a place where we can connect with one another.

Yes, I said, but I didn’t see what was wrong with hating people who hurt other people.

What’s wrong is what it will do to you, he said, it will make you heartsick. It doesn’t feel good, does it? You don’t have to forgive them, he said, but it will help you if you try to understand them. Everyone does the best they can, by their own lights. That is a cure for being so heartsick, he said, try it. Somehow, it restores hope.

It’s a tricky idea, and it fails for me as often as it works, and it was an extraordinarily difficult thing for me to do today. But I did it, and it helped. I wondered at people who love so much they will kill others and themselves for their idea of it. I wondered at children who will sacrifice their lives to kill other children, and in the most horrific way.

I felt for them, too. Could I possibly put myself in their shoes, was it possible for so small a person as me to take such a giant leap? I can’t tell anyone else what to do, or how to feel. I don’t really even know how I feel. It is not easy to be a human being.

In the small transitions of life, there is healing and hope. I took the dogs out to the sheep, and laughed as Fate rushed headlong into Zelda and butted her in the head by mistake, shocking the both of them.

Maria came to my office as I wrote this and told me solemnly that there were big changes in the kitchen, and she wanted me to hear them from her first. I though the ceiling had fallen down. I’ve moved the oatmeal into the cabinet with the cereal, she said. You may not be able to find it at first.

I said I would be all right, I would figure it out. I had to smile.

She said she was going to the hardware store to buy some shelf paper. I know how she will spend the day. And I got an e-mail from Stephanie, a retired English teacher who has been trying – without much success – to save my grammatical soul for years. She had a favor, she asked. Would I at least try to understand the difference between its and it’s.

I would try, I promised, but not too hard.

I’m not sure about the God thing, if he or she exists, I think God can’t or won’t help with being heartsick. God seems unreliable to me, too many nasty things happen for me to count on him. He is not reliable for me. We have to figure it out ourselves.

Life is the Mother, she never stops, never dies, never quits.  She is the God of the small things. Every awful thing, I learned, is a reason to be better, to hope for the best.

I worship life, it is faithful and reliable, it goes on and on.