Imagine that you are a primitive. You have just clawed your way to the top rung of the evolutionary ladder. You have achieved humanity. Your mind is developing a capacity for the self-consciousness that will be your defining characteristic as a member of the species Homo sapiens. You are aware of yourself as being distinct from others, with private thoughts and complex relationships with those around you. You have a self.
You lie in your cave after a long day's hunting. Although you do not yet possess anything that could be called language, you find yourself able to string together connected thoughts. As night comes and sleep approaches, you use this new awareness to take stock of your body, perhaps probing a bruised limb or savoring the taste of recent food. And then, in the dark silence, a terrible and awe-inspiring realization strikes you. It is something you have never before noticed in your grueling daily quest for simple survival.
There is something alive inside you.
Right there, pulsing beneath your ribs. It hammers out a steady rhythm that reverberates through your musculature. If you touch your neck or your wrist or your leg, you can feel its report. It is as if a small but powerful beast has lodged inside your chest. The realization excites and frightens you. With this surge of emotion, the beast responds by quickening its activity — as if it senses your fear.
For the next few days, you go about your routine. You have no choice. You must, after all, survive. But it is always there, as you hunt and feast and rest, this churning presence inside your ribs. Speeding up sometimes, slowing down in other situations — but never resting, not for an instant. In the middle of the night, when everything else is quiet, it can be as loud as thunder.
And then, in a moment as terrible and wonderful as when you first became aware of this pulsing creature, you understand something else. This is no foreign body. This is no predatory stranger trapped within your bones. It is part of you. It is you. The center of that individuality you have only recently understood. You have discovered yourself. You have discovered your heart.
For as long as we have been self-aware, we have been in awe of the fact that there is something so vital, so alive, within our bodies: a relentlessly active core with a will of its own. An animating essence that does not obey our commands the way our hands do, or our eyelids, or even our lungs. A link to the universal motion surrounding us, the tides and stars and winds, with their puzzling rhythms and unseen sources. Once this awareness dawned, it would have been impossible for us ever again to look at ourselves or the world the same way.
The heart is a mystery and a miracle. It beats roughly every second of our lives — two and a half billion times during an average lifespan. It does not rest, pumping around seventy-four gallons of blood every hour once we become adults. Although it weighs only about fifteen ounces, it is immensely strong — the amount of energy it generates in a single day could drive a car twenty miles.
And it can stop at any moment. It can stop when we are newborn babies asleep in the crib or when we are healthy teenagers walking off the practice field on a sultry August afternoon. It can arrest when we are shoveling snow in our middle age or when we are a hundred years old and our minds have been swept of memory for a decade. The heart is the ultimate arbiter of our lives. When it calls time, the game is over.
Introduction from The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart
No comments:
Post a Comment