When the Easy Path Isn’t: What it Really Takes to Stay Soft—Even When You’re Hurting
The Ending I Didn’t Expect
A week and a half ago, Peter ended our relationship.
No conversation.
No call.
Just an email message.
And just like that, the relationship was over.
On Valentine’s Day, Peter and I met in person and agreed to take a break. He said he needed space to work on himself, without me as a distraction or a safety net. Those were his words. He promised to give me a date, sometime in May, when we’d reconnect and talk things through.
That date never came.
I honored our agreement. I didn’t reach out, even though it was hard. I sent him letters — real ones — but not with the expectation of a response. I even wrote in them: You don’t need to write back. I’m not trying to pressure you. I just need a place to put this love, this longing, this confusion.
Then, on May 14th, 90 days later, I re-initiated contact.
But that’s when something deeper began. Not a breakup — a breach. A quiet shift I didn’t see coming.
A Message, Not a Moment
That evening, my phone buzzed. I was outside working when I saw his name light up the screen. And in that instant, my stomach dropped. I knew.
I knew what he was going to say.
I had my doubts about whether he’d done the work. If he had, I never got to see it. There was no real conversation — no moment where we looked at it together, acknowledged what was true, and sat in the discomfort side by side. We’d talked about that spectrum before — how relationships can navigate between collaboration, negotiation, and ultimatum. And how the worst of all is a fait accompli — a decision handed down with no input, no care, no room for humanity.
And that’s what he gave me.
A decision. Not a conversation.
A cold, silent landing.
In Cleared for Love, I write about what it means to be co-pilots in a relationship — not just passengers along for the ride. Being in the cockpit together means facing turbulence — together. Navigating the map — together. Choosing presence, even when the route changes — together.
But Peter didn’t stay in the cockpit.
He packed his parachute.
Jumped.
And left a note behind.
Maybe that was the best he could do.
But when you’ve committed to co-pilot the plane together —
you don’t just bail mid-flight.
You talk to your copilot.
And I just stood there, staring at the phone, reading the message — and everything inside me twisted. Not because of what he said. But how he said it.
No call.
No dialogue.
Not even a chance to show who I am or how I hold things.
After everything we had built over eight months, I got a message. A Dear Scott email.
It felt like being erased.
Like I was unimportant.
Like the intimacy we had shared didn’t warrant a final moment of real presence.
Like he didn’t believe we could bring this ending to a place where we looked each other in the eye and said: this matters.
That’s what hurt most. Not the content — the delivery.
The choice to treat me like someone who couldn’t handle the truth, instead of someone who had shared a seat at the table.
And I still don’t have the words for the feeling that came with that. I just know it landed hard. Deep. In a place where I thought we were stronger than that.
But this isn’t about Peter. He’s not the story. The real story began after the message, when something inside me started to twist.
It didn’t hit like rage or despair. It was subtler than that. A kind of twisting. Like something inside me had tilted off-center. A quiet hardening I could almost mistake for clarity.
The Ache After Grace
This is where “ill will” started whispering. Not loud. Not angry. Just familiar. Just convincing.
Despite the pain, because of the skills built through meditation practice, I was able to focus on metta bhāvanā, loving-kindness. I strived to meet it with karuṇā, compassion. I reminded myself that everyone is doing the best they can. That sometimes people leave not to hurt you, but because they don’t know how to stay. I was able to compose a response, which I emailed to him, that was grounded in those qualities. My words embodied them as I typed them on the keypad.
But even as I wrote, I could feel something changing: a tension building beneath the calm.
Then, as the days passed, I could feel a quiet ache.
The quiet efforts of vyāpāda — “ill will” — doing its best to come in some back door to my heart and disrupt my equanimity.
Because no matter how mature I tried to be about it, the truth is — this hurt.
Pain.
Because pain is the primary tool vyāpāda uses to weasel its way into your life and derail your serenity.
Pain that was caused by an attachment — an expectation — that wasn’t met: not that things would go back to how they were, not because I needed a happy ending.
Pain caused by a belief that we would talk.
Pain caused by a judgment that Peter was the kind of person who would not just send a “Dear Scott” letter.
Pain fueled by my belief that I had a clearer read on him — and on us — than I did.
Pain because I believed we would honor what we had.
And we ended up with none at all.
I wasn’t just hurt. I was disoriented — unsure how to reconcile what I believed with what had actually happened.
But the pain wasn’t the danger.
The real threat was what that pain tried to turn into.
And in that moment, I realized how easy it would be — how tempting it would be — to let that ache calcify.
To let vyāpāda build walls.
To let vyāpāda judge.
To let vyāpāda convince me that it could protect me from the pain caused by my attachment to a certain outcome.
It doesn’t need to win.
It just needs to pollute the water.
A single drop of bitterness and the whole system shifts.
The World Rewards Hardened Hearts
I live in a world — we all do — that encourages that kind of response.
Someone hurts you? Cut them off.
Someone disappoints you? Write them out.
Gather your friends. Share your side. Get validation.
Build a fortress around your heart and call it strength.
That is what we do when the numbers are in our favor — when they are not, we walk away from entire groups, churches, friends, and support networks.
It’s everywhere.
Politics. Social media. Relationships. Community groups. Spiritual circles.
We know what it feels like when someone disagrees with us, misunderstands us, or questions something we hold dear — and then walks away.
And yet we do the same thing.
We shut the door.
We don’t just correct — we erase.
We’ve gotten exceptionally good at deleting people.
We’ve gotten exceptionally good at running away.
And convincing ourselves that it’s healthy.
I know — I am tempted to do it, too.
To shut the door and call it healing.
That’s how “ill will” works. It tells us we’re protecting ourselves when we’re actually isolating.
But it is not.
It is caustic and corrosive and crushing, masquerading as truth.
But it’s not the truth — it’s pain, weaponized.
What the Heart Can’t Compartmentalize
Because here’s what I know — not from theory, but from years of practice:
You cannot harden your heart to one person and expect it to stay open to others.
That’s not how the heart works. It doesn’t have compartments.
A hardened heart is a hardened heart.
And no matter how good the justification, no matter how strong the case we build against someone, if we close ourselves off, we don’t just lose them.
We lose ourselves.
We lose the version of us that was capable of tenderness. Of grace. Of holding complexity.
We lose access to the parts of us that make love possible in the first place.
You think you’re only closing off to one person. But soon you’re holding back in other places, with other people. Even with yourself.
I don’t want to lose that.
Not for Peter.
Not for anyone.
Choosing the Soft Path
I want to stay soft.
Even if it hurts.
Especially because it hurts.
Because the version of me that meets pain with openness — that chooses to remain loving even when love isn’t returned — that’s the man I’ve worked hard to become.
Not by accident. Not by default. But through years of choosing softness over certainty. Of failing at it. Of trying again.
This is the real spiritual practice.
The kind that shows up not when you’re on the cushion, but when someone you love walks away.
And you have to decide whether your heart walks away, too.
The Five Hindrances — And How They Show Up
This is the architecture of the hijack.
Five forces.
Five ways the heart gets clouded without even realizing it’s happening.
Because if I don’t recognize them when they show up, they don’t just steer the ship — they become the ocean.
The hindrances I write about in Come As You Are: Five Years Later are all here, stalking me like a saboteur in monk’s robes, showing up with terrible timing and worse advice. In the Buddhist tradition, they’re called the pañca nīvaraṇāni.
We have already talked about vyāpāda — “ill will” — the turning away through anger or resentment.
The other four are the ones that cloud the heart and obscure clear seeing:
Kāmacchanda — Sensual craving
The grasping after what we want.
It shows up as longing for what was, the pull to recreate the good moments with Peter, the hope that maybe if I say the right thing, it won’t be over.
It’s the “what if” loop that haunts me when I should be sleeping.
The craving for contact. For clarity. For a different ending.
Thīna-middha — Sloth and torpor
The heavy dullness of heart and mind.
It creeps in the morning, I don’t want to meditate.
In the afternoon, I scroll instead of walking.
The quiet moment where I tell myself: What’s the point?
This one doesn’t look loud, but it is.
It whispers: Just check out.
And some days, I almost do.
Uddhacca-kukkucca — Restlessness and remorse
The agitated spinning.
This is the mental flurry: Should I have done something differently? Should I not have sent the letters? Should I have pushed harder? Backed off more?
It’s the hamster wheel of imagined fixes for a past that cannot be changed.
A mind that won’t sit still.
Vicikicchā — Doubt
The corrosive uncertainty that unravels trust.
This one hits deepest.
Maybe I was too much. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I don’t know how to do relationships at all.
Doubt of Peter. Doubt of the connection. Doubt of the path. Doubt of myself.
Each of these — every single one — pulls me away from presence. From reality. From what’s actually happening now.
They don’t want me to grieve cleanly.
They don’t want me to love cleanly.
They want me stuck.
Hooked.
Looping.
And they’re so sneaky.
They don’t yell — they whisper.
They disguise themselves as reason, as insight, as protection.
But they’re none of those things.
Their goal is to close the heart.
The Real Work Is Staying
And I’ve learned to recognize their voices.
They dress themselves up like protectors, but they don’t protect.
They poison.
They don’t serve my healing — they sabotage it.
They tempt me with the illusion of safety, when what I want — what I need — is wholeness.
But I’ve lived that kind of safety. It comes at the cost of presence.
And that doesn’t come from shutting down.
It comes from staying in the room.
Yes, it would be easier to disengage.
Yes, it would be easier to be angry.
Yes, it would be easier to rewrite the story in a way that makes me the saint and Peter the sinner.
But that’s not the life I want to live.
I want a life that’s honest. Present. Accountable.
I want a heart that still believes in people, even when they let me down.
I want to love without building escape routes.
Staying soft doesn’t mean staying available to harm. It means refusing to calcify in response to it. That’s the difference. Softness isn’t fragility. It’s strength without armor.
And I can’t have that if I keep choosing the easy way out.
What About You?
Who have you hardened your heart toward?
What would it look like to soften — just a little — today?
What kind of life do you want to live:
One built on stories about betrayal and justification?
Or one that insists on presence — even when it costs you something?
Not every rupture comes with a breakup speech. Some just echo quietly in the background of our lives.
Because the heartbreak isn’t always romantic.
Sometimes it’s trust that cracked.
A conversation that never happened.
A moment — or moments — that went sideways and never came back.
But the same choice remains:
To calcify, or to stay open.
To armor up, or to stay soft.
To live from the wound, or live from the wisdom it revealed.
Because you can’t have both.
If this resonates, share it. Leave a comment. Send it to someone who’s hurting. Not because I need the validation. But because someone, somewhere, might need the reminder:
You can walk through rupture — and still come out soft.
Whatever form that rupture takes.
Intrigued by what you just read? There’s more where it came from. These books go deeper into the same themes — how we navigate rupture, rebuild presence, and stay open when it would be easier to close.
