Love is the biggest risk you can ever take, but like all the most dangerous ventures, it comes with the biggest payout.

“I love you,” he tells me after he tightly clenches the toy I gave him to his chest. After a long day at work, I have taken a taxi to take me to an orphanage where I visit children who have lost both of their parents. The orphanage is bursting with volunteers who have love in their hearts willing to spend Saturday afternoon with life-giving children.

The place has come to life when I entered it carrying children books and some toys. I could see bustling activities all around me. Children are playing, mucking around and ducking each other while a loud festival music is playing at the background. Mothers playing hide and seek with some children. And others who are preparing food for the whole group. I see a young couple on the ground playing some sort of game with their hands with a young boy who cannot be more than 10 looking at their faces raptly.

There is love in this orphanage.

While I was sighing with bliss, Abel (the boy I have grown to love) said something to me I did not catch.

Me: “What did you say? Sorry, I did not hear you.”

Abel: “When I told you that I love you, you have not told me that you love me too.” He is touching the toy I gave him reverently as if it is the Mona Lisa.

Me: “Oh, you know that I love you.”

Abel: “Yes, but you have to say it.”

Me: “I love you very much.”

He sighs happily and hugs me with his thin arms around my neck. A grin spreads across my face so quickly that it was almost as if it had always been there. And just when my cheeks started hurting from smiling so hard, he asks me looking at my smiling face, “why are you smiling so weirdly?” I hugged him for what must have been a long time and told him, “I learn a lot from you, do you know that?”

Abel: “I am 7, silly. What can you possibly learn from me?”

Me: “I learn everything that matters from you.”

Abel: “What does that mean?”

I found it difficult to answer his question when he is already giving all that he has to the world. Love.

Abel is 7. He has lost his parents since he was 2 years old. I met him at the orphanage a couple of months ago. It would be easy to argue that he doesn’t yet fully understand what love means and yet I believe that it is precisely because there is no scarring or mental concepts attached to his understanding of it that he expresses it so purely and freely.

I wonder sometimes how when his mother has been taken away from him by death that he can love so freely. I have never once seen him angry at the world for taking his parents at his young age. I have never once seen him pout and hole himself up in his room shutting the world out. He is always smiling and making jokes with other children. He laughs joyously as if he is living inside a castle. And he might as well have because his heart is so full of love that others seeing him eyes him with jealousy. His eyes sparkle with enjoyment.

His smile is more powerful than the blazing of the sun.

And I marvel at him. The way he expresses love whenever he feels like it — whether that is 10 times a day or none at all. His eyes are not hiding anything behind their shadows. They assume an unbearable tenderness. A desire to see me happy wherever I visit him and the others — making me question all the times I block myself against myself, the moments when I find a self-directed dislike growing in me.

This boy of 7 loves fiercely. His heart is open. You can hear its crack a million times by the hardship life has thrown at him before he was even ten. And yet he still loves deeply and fully.

There is no notion in him of regulating the outpour of his love to protect his heart or of using it to accomplish any other end but to see me happy and smiling like him all the time. It’s almost as if he has to share his love, has to give it and show it with the same wonder that you would for seeing a beautiful sunset and you tell yourself, “My God, I have to share this with someone!”

It is outrageously beautiful to see and witness the way this boy loves.

Love will keep breaking our hearts until they open and that we will be the ones throwing ourselves in again and again.

When I first met my current boyfriend, I can honestly say that I have locked my heart and thrown the key away. I wanted to engage with him and be open to him. But,

How can I love openly when I was still clearing the damage and debris left from my last relationship?

Even if you bring a special key that locks any door, you would not have been able to open my heart because I had locked it from the inside. And there is no love without opening our hearts. There is no love without sharing what you already have.

Love is not relying on someone else to open the keys to your closed heart. It is not relying on someone to give you something to supplement.

Boyfriend checks in on me and provides commentary on what he is doing: “Call me when you get there and don’t forget to tell me about your article today” is how he shows his love. And I showed my love by being silent. By not opening up. By not participating. Because I was afraid.

Our relationship was a silent battle where he waits for me to open up and I work hard and do everything in my power to protect my heart from future disappointments. And gathering my armor around me so that I will not get hurt.

Love is the life you live fully. It’s the happiness you give and the love you get back. It’s the richness and simplicity of ten or thousands of days.

Expecting that another person will hurt you because you have chosen to open your heart is a deadly expectation that kills your present moment. Like it did mine for almost a year until I have had it with this kind of life where I was trapped inside my own heart, my heart neatly sealed, safe from the joys and sorrows of life.

“Why the hell am I not participating in this love? Why have I allowed myself to be in an emotional solitary confinement?”

“No. I can’t do this anymore. I am not going to be afraid anymore.” I told myself.

Since then, I have told him “I love you” more times than I can remember. Every day is a battle to stay open because I still feel how my heart was bruised and bleeding from the way my ex betrayed my trust. I still feel like someone has ripped my guts out.

But I choose to stay in the battle. The battle of living life fully. It is a battle to stay open, to feel those terrifying emotions, to remain vulnerable — even if that means getting hurt.

I have learned to speak what I am feeling. And to talk about what I am afraid of. And I have bared that beating, heart of mine in more ways that I can imagine and I have become a better, more loving human being thanks to that.

Choosing to develop love again feels like stepping out onto a bridge with no chance of going backward but equally no knowledge of what lies ahead, but I am happy that I have chosen to open my heart anyway.

Love deeply and fully.

Your relationship may end in disaster and pain but love to the depths of your heart. And only then will you be free, open-hearted and present. And pulsingly alive.

Love desperately. And hear the sound of your heart shattering over you making you hurt. Love again.

Choose love over caution, over fear and over pride.

And if it doesn’t work out like you have hoped it would, let go of your love. And it would be the greatest show of grit, of pain and of love that you would show to yourself.

I no longer believe the universe is conspiring against me. I am living as if it is in my favor. And that has a transformative effect on how things affect me. Opening my heart and assuming things will unfold in my best interest is the best thing that I did for myself.

The opposite was diminishing me.

To Your Inspirations,

Banchi