When someone puts their guard up, its to protect themselves. Its a mindset that forces a person to proceed with caution. Think of it as training wheels on a bicycle. They help you get through the difficult part without having to worry about falling down again. When a guard is put up, its typically a natural thing. Its something that is inevitable and instinctive. But instincts cannot always drive a person. Sometimes its instinctive for me to want to kill someone in cold blood. I was born in sin and that is something I will have to fight. Not that it will be difficult to fight the sensation of wanting someone's blood on your hands but you get the point. Lots of other things come instinctively too. Love, forgiveness, emotional embrace, sorrow, depression, anger, breathing. Half of the things we do in life are out of instinct and nothing more. Our minds and bodies function on instincts. Our minds instinctively tell our bodies how to fight off diseases and tell our lungs to keep moving.
There is a time to let down a guard just as there is a time to put it up. It may not be evident when you should do so and different people may take more or less time to do so, but what goes up must undoubtedly come back down again. In due time, your guard can be released and you can move on with your life. Guards can help you get back on your feet again and help you gain back your independence. But guards can also close someones mind. The difference between a close minded person and an open minded person is this:
A person with a closed mind is unable to face facts as they really are due to a personal bias. They familiarize with what they know and throw everything else out. They feel as if they have all of the answers they need already and that their unchanging perspective on life is going to better them. Of course, this may make a person emotionally stable but it can also prevent them from achieving their full potential by simply not allowing new ideas in as facts.
An open minded person is like a magnet to new ideas. Open minded people can work together to form even newer, better ideas by taking these new ideas they have taken in and transforming them based on everything else they know. In time, the open minded person eventually closes their mind up as well, thinking that they have reached the end of their journey for enlightenment. False. No one can ever reach the end and have everything figured out. There is always something unknown to this world. Something that cannot and will not ever have an answer. These dangling and profound questions and ideas are brought to conclusions by the closed minded, turning them into fact and that is their grounds for believing.
Inner peace and stability is the key to being able to let your guard down. It is not always based on what you know for fact. Sometimes believing in something solely on an emotion is enough to be able to comfortably let your guard down. Sometimes this is safe, sometimes not. Depending on the situation, you should know when you can do so. Until the point of no return, there is no reason to give up on anything in life. Until there is simply no physical way of something happening and you know this one hundred percent, there is no logical reason to give up. Our rapidly changing world is filled with rapidly changing people and rapidly changing ideas that are constantly and unstoppably going to keep changing until they are brought to an end.
and in that faith let us, to the end,
dare to do our duty as we understand it.
--Abraham Lincoln--