Closed

I find I often struggle with finding balance in things. Whether it be spending too much time with one person so another relationship suffers from lack of time, or reading so many books in one month that I can't seem to even gather up enough concentration to read an email for months after, to the struggle of independence and dependence.

Today I was reading (its probably one of those months I refered to earlier)a book by Henri Nouwen, who else? Ha! He quoted Kahil Gibran's words from a wedding ceremony and they said this,

"Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone. Even
as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Stand together yet not too near together For the pillars of the temple stand
apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

So often we are forced into a false sense of honesty and many times this honesty can lead to harm rather than good. It enables us to live a life without healthy boundaries. Henri Nouwen says this, "just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses it's meaning when there is no ability to be closed." I am in no means trying to knock on healthy community, but I think it's wise for us to understand that there is a good thing in finding balance between our need for vulnerability and our need to be closed.

I hope I can give myself the freedom to be closed sometimes.