Your heart’s no good as a heart until it’s been broken at least ten times.
—Actor/screenwriter Emma Thompson quoting her grandmother

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1. Being born. If that’s not a heartbreaker, what is? Coming into air, for starters, cold air that prompts lungs you didn’t know you had to start—what’s that?—breathing. You’re squeezed through a tight chute only to emerge into a bright, cold world only to get a rude whack on the back or butt, a taste of unfairnesses to come. You’ve done nothing to deserve that. Or any unkindness. Ever.

Good heavens! you prayerfully wail. Let me crawl back into that warm place and hibernate forever.

God (or someone in charge) doesn’t seem to be listening.

2. The taking away… of boob’s sweet milk, of a mum’s and dad’s comforting arms, of the cradle for a crib for a bed, of the bottle for food to moosh around in the mouth.

3. The next child. There are others like you? You thought You Were It. What is this crying thing taking up the attention that belongs solely to you? Why do they not hold you like that? You cry, too, feeling—before you know the word—bereft.

4. And that rhymes with being left. At daycare. Or some strange place with strangers. At this thing called school where other small people (and some big ones) can be so unkind. One day they want to play with you and the next they don’t. Or call you names, make you feel like crawling up your own armhole.

5. Failure. Or what feels like it. If you are lucky, it’s not fatal. It just feels like it. The test you fail, written or spoken, with someone you didn’t know was testing you. Sometimes you feel that you have failed, and you may not have, but that feeling deepens the cracks in your little hearts nonetheless.

6. The friend who no longer loves you. The lover who no longer loves you. The spouse even.

7. The employer who no longer thinks highly of you. May well fire you. Does fire you. The job that didn’t work out after that one either. And maybe the next one.

8. The big whoppers: This one dies. That one dies. Whether your first pets or our older-than-god-grandparents, they disappear. Forever. And then your dear friends and those you never knew but have admired from afar. Their loss stings longer than you think it should. Spouses and parents, even. Good ones who adored you. Poof!

9. Watching your home/your life/your country burn. And you with only the smallest fire extinguisher that, once spent, can no more quell the flames than can your tiny feet trying to stomp them out. This is wrong! you cry. It’s not fair! And you are not wrong.

You feel your heart crack in the same spots it has for years, thinking, This time it’s over. We’re done for. And, flailing, you reach out a hand only to find, to your surprise, another hand meeting yours. And you look at the one attached to that hand and see that someone else is holding their hand, and, down the line, someone else and someone else—this great human chain of kindness, which you thought had burnt up long ago.

And this, it turns out, is how you begin to patch up your cracked heart. By borrowing pieces of the generous hearts of others, so many of whom are happy to donate parts of their own broken hearts, to you. Yes, you. As you will in turn (as you have done, actually, for a long time now) to someone standing next to you. You will reach out your hand and connect to a hand you don’t know. A stranger’s just a friend waiting to happen. So let it happen.

10. And oh, the magic, the mystical, the inexplicability of closing your eyes and finding a long-gone beloved there, or awakening and feeling that you’ve just been with them in a dream you can’t quite recall. The joy-tinged sorrow of that. Or walking in the door and smelling their scent that disappeared years before. Of finding the companion spirits in attendance, as they’ve always been, the gods and goddesses hand in hand with the guardian angels working overtime on your behalf, wielding their little patch kits, lining the cracks in your heart with gold, making it shine—the light at the edge of your darkness.

Let it shine. Oh, let it shine.

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• See the whole Emma Thompson interview at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival

• “A stranger’s just a friend waiting to happen.” (Antsy McClain, “When You’re Laughing”)

• “The light at the edge of your darkness. Let it shine. Oh, let it shine.” (Dan Fogelberg, “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler”)