The heart is an amazing organ. From the day we are born to the day we die it never stops working. Over an 80 year lifespan the heart will beat over 3 billion times pumping over a million barrels of blood through your body.
That’s a lot of labour.
Perhaps this is why the heart demands reason. Why it is the heart that asks why. Everyday it asks, firmly, quietly. Give me a reason today. Tell me why I should keep this blood in circulation. I have been doing this for a very long time and, honestly, I have very little to show for it. Why?
The mind is easier to convince. All the mind needs is a path to follow. As long as the mind can tread along a path, it can ignore the labour of the heart. As long as the mind can see something to work towards, it will demand the work of the heart. Perhaps this is why they say ‘there is only so much the heart can take’ when they talk about death. The heart, dragged along by the mind, stops. This, the heart says, this is not working. This is slow destruction, the unravelling.
The slow unbecoming.
There is less. Everyday there is less to give and more to take on. Everyday there is more to be done and less being done.
Perhaps it is the slow burn of the unraveling that destroys one. How every step seems like a step that can be controlled. How hope slowly slips away. You don’t wake up one day and think it is over. You look up and realise it has been over for a long time, and recognize how long you have been running against brick walls. Perhaps it is in this looking back that the heart gives in. It’s not just in the crushing from the weight, but in seeing the emptiness in it all. For the heart has only asked for one thing through everything.
Reason.
Every beat, over 3 billion times, it has asked for reason.
Perhaps it is the absence of this that does it in.
And to continue seems like an odd reason.
In many ways then the mind preempts the heart, keeping the heart from destroying itself . And the heart keeps the mind tethered, ensuring that there is meaning to whichever brand of madness the mind choses.
And so we oscillate.
And so we oscillate.
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