There are periods of time more tender than the rest. In the same way, there are experiences, shadows of emotion, which have this same rawness. It could be a moment where we are laid bare, our hearts connect to the vulnerability of our experiences or another's. There have been a lot of these moments for me lately; moments where I am made soft by the world, more soft than I would particularly like to be. 

We are made soft by the sorrows of the world, the rawness of grief, of loss, of our confidences bruised, of failure; the same is true of our exposure to love, which too is intertwined with fear. We are made soft because though we are bone, we are also flesh. We feel through our nerves, through our worries, through the abstractions of our imagination. When we speak of tenderness, it is not simply a sensitivity we speak of, but a soreness which arises upon stimulation. We are made soft, we are met with the world, and we are reminded of the vulnerability innate to the human experience.

Like I said, I’ve had a lot of these moments lately, where I am reminded not only of my own softness but of the recurring nature of these experiences. It is not simply that these moments are occurring, but that they cannot be prevented, and they will happen again. Often, I think of tenderness in the very real sadness which emerges through loss, or through witnessing another’s loss. We relate, we grieve. There is nothing to be done. 

But there is more to it. Tenderness is visceral in that it runs deep. We have opened ourselves to the possibility of feeling a larger spectrum of emotion. We are open to becoming bruised. This is not to be confused with some sort of emotional injury, but instead, is a bruising that shows us how much we can feel, and how much others can. 

If we do wish to view tenderness through the lens of an injury, it is best viewed in knowing how much something hurts for another. Tenderness is knowing how hard to press, how gentle we must be when dressing a wound. We use tenderness as an instrument for empathy; we utilize our pain to make sense of another’s intimate experience with the world. We lean into love, and love, like all things worth feeling, has the potential to sour.

So when I said before that there is nothing to be done with tenderness, it is not that there is nothing that comes from it. It is the feeling of rawness that comes with being alive that is inevitable, but it is not immovable. We can use this feeling to know the world more deeply; to know more about one another and ourselves.

The vulnerability of our experiences is made obvious by the things that count. There is no shortage of valuable moments, all of which have the capacity to bring about hurt. Many of us are adverse to the experiences of discomfort brought through vulnerability. We want pain to stop; we wish only to feel that which is comfortable. Without tenderness, we stitch ourselves up; we decrease the risk of pain and joy altogether. 

In this world, we will begin to notice pain and suffering in a muted sense. We recognize pain, we turn away. We believe we can avoid hurt, and we believe the world is a rotten place that only makes us sad. The same is true in our relationships both to others and ourselves; we sense that closeness will disappoint us, or worse, prove our suspicions around our worthiness of love or other emotional trophies. We do not intend to investigate because we simply don’t want to find out. We stand in the shallow end; we never fully enter the water for fear that it is cold. 

And still, we begin to fulfil the prophecy of coldness without entering the water at all. We limit our warmth to ourselves, to others, and our experiences are dimmed by the blatant proof of life’s difficulties. We become deprived of the possibility of the overwhelming redemption made through the upclose experience of love and affection for the world, others, and ourselves.  

I do not know why we experience suffering intertwined so intimately in the process of uncovering the most joyous things, only that there is a tradeoff made worth it despite this. Though the way we hurt most intimately is a risk through tenderness, that is vulnerability, affection, and courage, we too experience life most beautifully in this way. This is the complicated part, isn’t it? That tenderness expands the scope of it all as a bridge between pain and pleasure. We must be willing to sit bare in front of oblivion to experience this humanness; we must be willing to be made soft to sit fully in the benefits of our being.

As I said before, it’s not something I or many others find particularly enjoyable. There is only one benefit to vulnerability, and that is intimacy. I think this is a pretty big one. Tenderness lets us know the world, each other, for as we are. We become closer to the world when we acknowledge it for what it is, for how it is, soreness and all. 

We cannot love the flower without acknowledging the fleetingness of its bloom. The same is true of one another. We must accept the experience of humanness in its full breadth, the ugliness, the beauty, the sacred sense of our belonging to one another that is revealed to us through the risk of our loneliness.

So, what do we do with all this tenderness? Our only good option is to become more human through it. The discomfort of our sore spirits becomes only evidence of the spectrum of our being, of our allegiance to human experience. Instead of closing ourselves off and becoming hurt by the shallowness of surviving, we must reveal ourselves and begin the process of vulnerability with our world. Many of us grow away from the instinct to shut down, but it is not easy either way. There is no reason I can give for why the best path must be the difficult one; it is just this way, and I have no explanation for its design.  

Yes, we are soft because, because, because, and despite our fears of hurt, many of us grow closer to the possibility of pain through our own willingness. This willingness is solely due to the value of its eventual fruit, that is, the depth of our conscious engagement with life. The world is a sore place, but it is a beautiful one; its soreness only partially revealed through our innate love of the world, our hurts only becoming proof of our invaluable connection to it all. 

So when we say our hearts are aching, perhaps we can call it the evidence of our belonging, of our hearts connected to a wider beat, a rhythm, a set of contractions and releases which pervade our being and enter the wider design of our consciousness. When we sense our humanness, that is, the tenderness of our hearts and spirits, we can call it our reminder because in life, we have surely forgotten. If the tenderness arrives and we feel inclined to shoo it away, we know instead that we welcome a different kind of pain, a dull and aching pain for which we have no use. When we decide the fear of tenderness is more valuable than its reward, we are already losing; we have already lost. 

There is depth to all that’s living, and it is messy, weird and uncomfortable, which in itself defines the way of things to be orderly, normal and experiential. What a blessing it is to remember the way of things, what a blessing it is to allow ourselves to be bruised in this way, in this tender, loving way.