Hedgehogs Are Born Without Spines

“Hedgehogs are born without spines.”

An old line from a Bulgarian film. A child’s sentence on the surface, yet somehow almost an entire philosophy of life.

It’s 3:00 a.m.
I wake up with exactly this thought in my head:

“Hedgehogs are born without spines…”

And I start thinking about how strangely life begins for human beings.

We come into this world defenseless. Soft. Trusting.
Naively trusting that other people are… human.

And then we begin to learn.

Life never calls ahead. It never asks whether you’re ready. It simply walks in uninvited and says:

“Welcome.
Here’s some anxiety, five disappointments, a few toxic colleagues, and one love story… for character development.”

And the spines begin to grow.

At twenty, you still believe in destiny.
At thirty, you mostly believe in coffee and weekends.
After forty, you begin to value silence more than loud people.
At fifty… you still care. You just spend less time explaining why.

Somewhere along the way, we all become a little like hedgehogs.

You learn to protect yourself.
You curl up when danger comes near.
Sometimes you even hurt the people you love. Not because you are cruel, but because life has taught you that soft hearts often pay the highest price.

And then we wonder why the world has become so cold.

The greatest irony is that the people with the most spines were often the kindest souls in the beginning. Maybe also the most trusting. The most genuine ones. The ones who gave without counting the cost.

Until life taught them to be careful.

Maybe the point is not to remain without spines.
That is impossible.

The world does not leave anyone completely soft forever.

Maybe the real meaning is, despite everything, not to become nothing but our spines.

Not to forget who we were before fear.
Before disappointment.
Before we started protecting ourselves from everything.

And if we are very lucky in this life, somewhere among all the noise, exhaustion, and absurdity, we find a person beside whom we can simply sit in peace.

No spines.
No roles.
No need to defend ourselves.
No hurting each other.

Just love.

The kind we may have carried within us from the very beginning… before the world convinced us that we had to become hedgehogs.

“Everything is still so pure and simple…
Strange how, and when,
some people managed to turn the world
into something so complicated and full of questions.”