15 Dec The power in staying soft in a hard world.
Good Morning team,
I want to write today about staying soft. This may not be the kind of thing you expect from me however there is secret power in this i just think you have know.
Most of us begin life with a kind of openness that feels almost reckless in hindsight. As children, we move through the world wide eyed, trusting, curious, and largely unguarded. Children have this simple and refeshing way of navigating the world. They expect the best of people and believe effort leads to reward. When we are young, we assume that kindness will be met with kindness. That innocence is pure and in many ways it is simply the starting posture of a human being who has not yet been trained to brace themselves.
Life, of course, has other ideas.
As the years pass, the world introduces its rules of engagement. You learn them through disappointment, rejection, betrayal, and unmet expectations. You discover that giving too much can cost you. You notice that softness is sometimes exploited by others, and optimism is not always rewarded. Slowly, often without realising it, yor posture changes. You sharpen your edges, become more guarded and you stop giving an inch. I have in the past gotten to a place where I mistaked hardness for maturity and bluntness for strength.
The tragedy is that this transformation is presented as growth.
We are told that becoming tougher is simply part of growing up, that cynicism is evidence of intelligence, and that emotional distance is a reasonable response to being hurt enough times. Over time, the world convinces us that the safest way to survive is to become calloused, to expect less, and to care less deeply. Yet what often gets lost in that process is not pain, but lightness. Something essential quietly slips away.
The easiest option is to let the darkness of the world settle inside you. It requires very little effort to allow other people’s bitterness, failures, and unfulfilled dreams to begin shaping your own inner life. Resentment spreads easily and is always looking for bedfellows. Before long, you are carrying weight that was never meant to be yours, and you start to confuse that heaviness with realism.
This is where the real test of strength appears.
In a cruel and callous world, staying tender is not passive is not denial or ignorance, instead its an act of resistance. A strong person does not pretend the darkness does not exist, but they refuse to let it define them. They do not allow the harshness on the outside to harden the inside. They remain soft hearted not because life has been kind to them, but because they have chosen not to surrender their inner life to what has hurt them. Trust me when i say i have many reasons why i should be hard and blunt. However im commited to this way of life.
That kind of tenderness takes discipline.
Here is what this all means