Homelessness can drive you to tears - Ewan Aitken

Ewan Aitken, CEO Cyrenians

There are good reasons humans have evolved to have the capacity to cry. Tears helps us manage and acknowledge how we feel. They make us stop and take account of our emotional state and help others know what we might be struggling to tell them.

What is maybe counter intuitive about our ability to shed tears is their appearance covers the full gamut of emotions from the deepest sadness to the greatest joy.

I discovered how true this is on what had been just another ordinary day around 25 years ago. My wife and I had a hospital appointment for a scan of our first child. In an otherwise unremarkable hospital room, we first saw our first grainy image of our child and then, seemingly from no-where, we heard his heartbeat.

I felt a huge wave of emotion well up inside me like I have never before experienced, and I burst into tears. I could not have stopped it even if I had wanted to. The beating sound of a new life from which I was partly responsible was to me a new understanding of what it was to be alive. It was a profound moment when I knew what love meant.

I left the hospital eyes still red. My wife headed home and, in a moment of serendipity I have never forgotten, I headed to the crematorium to conduct a funeral.

The deceased was a great grandmother who lived into her 90s. Family had been her everything in life and she had put all her energy into supporting the three generations hers had spanned.

More tears flowed. Tears of grief and sadness but also of joy at the many happy memories her life had created. They too were tears of love.

It was a day when I felt truly alive through connecting with someone not yet born and someone who I had never known, but whose death I had helped those who loved her mark.

Through my tears and the tears of others I discovered the extraordinary truth of how love can create the deepest human connection even before birth and how it lives on even after death.

My day job these days is homelessness prevention. In many situations in which people find themselves homeless, the root cause will be some form of broken relationship.

It’s why, when we talk about homelessness prevention, what we often mean is how do we support people to be in good, healthy relationships? How do we support young people to know how to be in good relationships with family, friends and those who support them professionally? How do we create strong communities so people of all ages can get help from people they know and trust?

Homelessness prevention begins a long way before the moment someone loses their house.

It begins when we know we are loved and can accept the love of others and offer it to them. It begins with deep human connection which starts before we are born and lives on after we die.