Everything I Know About Hearts (almost)

Hearts are soft, though I’ve never felt a real one so that might not be true.  I’ve seen a heart beating in a chest cracked open at the sternum but only in a video.  Still, it was disturbing. 

A heart can be removed from one body and put into another, a very puzzling thing.  What do you think they transport a heart in when it’s not in a body?  I was surprised to learn on the same video, one my cousin made, that it’s an ordinary cooler, one that usually holds lunch meat and beer.

But mostly, though they beat every moment of our lives, we don’t much notice our hearts unless we are running fast and come to a sudden halt, or unless our hearts are troubled, or unless a child runs to us and hugs us and we are a little frightened at how fast her heart is beating, and we take the child’s hand and press it to her chest, and we both gasp, surprised and delighted. 

From hearts flow emotion.

When our hearts stop beating, our lives are over, though I have heard of some yogis who train themselves to stop breathing for long periods of time and maybe their hearts stop beating too, and then start again, though I don’t know for sure, and sometimes a person’s heart is shocked back into beating by electrical charges given by a defibrillator which we learned about in CPR class as well as the new rules for CPA, 2 breaths to 30 compressions which doesn’t bring a person back from the dead, but does keep oxygen circulating through the body until the ambulance arrives. 

The smaller the creature, the quicker the heart beats, the bigger the creature the slower.  I know that mammals have four chambered hearts and that they make a lub-dub sound and that if you pay very close attention you can hear your own heart beating but mostly people only hear their hearts if they listen through a stethoscope which doesn’t happen very often. 

I have a grandpa and an aunt who died of heart attacks, each from different sides of the family, and probably more relatives who died of the same going long back.  My dad would also be dead of a heart attack except my mom called the ambulance right away and the doctors inserted a stint through his groin all the way up into an artery in his heart that was clogged and 12 years later his heart wasn’t working properly again, so they repeated the procedure and now he is doing fine.

I know that when we memorize we call it learning by heart, though mostly we learn to memorize with our minds.

I once read something interesting about how the symbol for heart came about even though it doesn’t look much like a real heart.  But now I have forgotten what that story is. 

I know that when we love, we feel a fluttering in our hearts, and when we drink a lot of coffee, we feel a drumming in our hearts, and when we're really frightened, we feel a burning in our hearts, and that there is a good reason for the expression broken hearted, because we ache in our hearts when we lose a great love, and this ache drives us to write sad songs and long poems that have no end. 

Hearts on cards are red.  The king of hearts has a sword through his head.  Candy hearts come in pastel colors and only taste good when you are sad.