Musings On the Heart
Consider the heart.
The biomedical heart, the four chambered muscle.
Children drawing hearts, a valentines day picture.
Broken hearts when we are sad, lonely, or hurt.
The heart beating, the rhythm in our bodies.
The heart means many things, the heart is a paradox.
The heart beat in our mother’s womb: the first rhythm.
Imagine being in this underwater and murky world and hearing with regularity the thump thump thumping. A distant watery echo of reassurance.
Is it this repetitive echo that gives us the will to live when in the outside world?
The heart is the foundation we return to when needed. We retreat into the trance of our own rhythm. The heart is a grounding device, the cave we can rest in.
When I am scared, my heart beats faster and makes me conscious of its movement. When I forget to breath because of a traumatic situation, my heart reminds me I am still here and living.
And not just living, but really existing right now. The heart reminds us of our presence in the current moment: the pattern lying underneath the present that carries us through.
We get lost in our hearts. When I lie down on your chest, I feel your heart beating. I lose myself in the rhythm. We feel our hearts moving rapidly, almost in unison. It feels meaningful, but it’s hard to understand why. Hearts are overflowing with meaning that is pure emotion: not of the spoken or explainable world.
Total and complete silence is impossible, because our hearts still beat. We take this for granted.
I remember Dr. Norwood, the renowned and controversial pediatric heart surgeon who operated on my sister’s heart at four days old. He was known to draw diagrams of the heart on a little notepad almost obsessively. He was trying to figure out the answer to the riddle of defective hearts.
He told us he thought it was amazing that hearts did not have more problems developing. That with their myriad complexities, they somehow worked.
The heart is the center of our body, a whole matrix of tubes and chambers that make blood and oxygen move through us. It springs forth a whole maze of processes and circulation.
It is the organ that we associate most closely with ourselves. This could be the reason why people often equate the heart as the locus of compassion, empathy, and love.
We project these things onto the heart, which beats involuntarily. The heart does not ever have a choice, unlike ourselves as we move through life.
I wonder about the connection between the movement of blood and oxygen through our bodies, and the way we move in the outside world.
The modern world presents us with disconnection. I am at work, I am at the hospital, I am thinking of somewhere far away, I am staring at my feet as I walk.
We file past each other on the street and barely look at each other. We sit next to each other on the bus but find it hard to talk. It seems as if we don’t know where we are really going.
All the disconnected events that make up a day, but our hearts beat.
I find myself sitting around with my sister recovering in this hospital and telling the story of how her life has been inextricably wound up with heart surgery. People want to know. The story is long and complicated.
“It’s really too hard to explain. It’s just about feelings,” she says.
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Somehow not the ticking of this clock
but the beating of this heart
makes the time pass
these days.