Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Tick, tick, tick...what do the heart and time have in common.

I recently saw an amazing video about the human heart, as told by a heart surgeon. (link below)  I have been pondering this subject (as is typical with my obsessive-compulsive nature) and want to share a few observations with you.  As shared in the video, when the first recipient of an artificial heart was being prepared for surgery, with all the questions his wife might have asked (risks, complications, etc) she only had one question.   It was "if you replace my husband's heart with a machine, will he still be able to love me?"  

Because it seems we feel so much, right there in the center of our being.  It is what keeps us alive right up until that last beat, that last moment in time.  That's it....our commonality!  Time doesn't matter to us anymore when our heart stops beating.  But on the other side of that coin, time matters very much when a heart stops beating of one we love.  We are still here.  Our heart aches, can mimic a heart attack and actually has a diagnosis of broken heart syndrome.   People with otherwise healthy hearts have died from this ...some just wished they would.

So I wonder why we don't measure time by our heartbeats instead of minutes?  Wouldn't we put so much more thought into how we spent (or didn't spend) our....heartbeats?  If the average heart rate per minute is 60-80 beats per minute and I use 70 for an average, that is 4,200 heartbeats per hour.  In an eight hour work day, you will spend on average approximately 100,800 heartbeats.  (I could have easily missed a few beats there....)

Realizing that we all only get a certain number of heartbeats in our life, how should we spend them?  Like minutes, you can't get them back.  They can be wasted on trivial things; you know what I'm talking about...how many times did you watch the same TV shows or play candy crush?   And if we only get so many, here is a real conundrum.  When we workout, run a marathon, all those healthy things...are we using up our heartbeats quicker OR do we earn extra "life's" like in the video games because we are doing all the right things OR doesn't it matter one way or the other because our number of heartbeats AND life's clock are synchronized/predetermined and will cease at the expiration date for this world (even though we all have one, I am glad we aren't marked with one). 

We have all these sayings connecting the heart and time.  I will be there in a heartbeat; give me a minute; time froze; my heart stopped.   The hardest one....l wish I could turn back the hands of time.   We can't.  My heart skips a beat on that one.  

I am walking a new road (as this blog states) and while I wander, I am taking some heartbeats to ponder things I never made time (or heartbeats) for before.  Thank you for spending approximately 140 heartbeats with me now.

May the beat go on,

Until next time,


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