On Heart

The following card recently brought a smirk of delight to my face.

I still think it's sweet, but, symbol scrutator that I am, it quickly got me thinking about the metaphor, the one that links the actual red organ in the (near) center of our chest pumping the lifeblood through out bodies with the symbolic language of  your "heart feeling for someone" or "having heart."

There's a lot of stuff going on here.

You're not making inappropriate interpretations of this, are you?

There are many possible theories of the origin of the symbol on the right. It could be derived from the stalk shape of the Silphium plant, an herb possibly used for birth control by the Romans and stamped on their currency. It also, depending on how you look at it, could be any number of naughty bits. I'd like to think that most people back in the day didn't know what a heart actually looked like and just didn't have anatomy textbooks, but they could feel it beat and knew it meant you were alive, so it warranted a symbol. It only makes sense that when people began using language and needed words to communicate their feelings (which they're still working on), the heart became a metaphor for love and willpower. In "A Heart-Shaped History", Iain Gately gives a great chronology of the symbol, concluding by saying, "Perhaps the intuitive link between the organ and love, which we are reminded of each time we meet our lovers and our heartbeats speed, will one day be explained and saluted by science." This here essay ain't science, but we're going to explore them grounds nonetheless.

So what's the relation between the cardiac organ and the driving force of your life? The thing in your body is a muscular pump about the size of your fist that contracts 60 to 100 times a minute in order to jettison oxygen and other nutrients to all the living cells of your body, along with any papercut as soon as it opens. The thing in your...I'm not exactly sure...is a force that guides us toward what we desire while adding flavor and texture to the experience of the moment and the overarching story of life, such as the incensed depression when a TV show kills off your favorite character or the inescapable terror when having a child.

Though the layout of the human brain doesn't exactly support the heart-to-heart metaphor. The brain is ridiculously complicated, so let's simplify the discussion using Paul D. McLean's model of the Triune Brain. Important to note the Triune Model is not 100% accepted in the scientific community, but it's accepted by plenty and'll get the job done.

Photo from Julia Atkin's article "An Outline of Integral Learning" found at: http://www.sacsa.sa.edu.au. Poor coloring unscientifically done by me on MS Paint.

• You've got the brain stem there with the oldest evolutionary grey matter, regulating the foundational functions of heart rate, breathing, walking, fighting, cuddling. It's the dumb grunt brain. It just does.
• The limbic system largely holds memory, enables learning, and generates emotion. Particularly the amygdala, the human brain's ego kid, which will pump you full of more hormones than an overdevoted athlete faster than the speed of a snakebite. Road rage, temper tantrums, insatiably stupid romance. It's the real seat of emotion.
• The amygdala uses those strong emotions to hijack the neocortex, which is the mammalian brain that offers us rationality, strategy, analysis, etc. The neocortex is where all the systemic and organizational functions of the human computer built civilization using that abundance of neural sponge afforded the homo sapien (and here's to being one of 'em). The neocortex evaluates decisions and calculates odds, and then it asks the limbic system what it really wants to do, because the rational brain, despite all its coldly calculated ego, doesn't control us like our emotional brains do. Sometimes their like a first mate on a ship trying to steer it in a thunderstorm. In decision making, sometimes the neocortex wins; sometimes the limbic system wins. Everyone has different percentages for how much one wins over the other. Again, that control's not a bad skill to develop.​

So at least in a way, the limbic system is the real seat of emotion. But you never hear "That boy has the amygdala of a saint." The invention of metaphor is a lot older than the invention of science.

I could write 5,000 boring words picking this picture apart.

In "The True Meaning of Having Heart", from BreakingMuscle.com, Eric C. Stevens also analyzes the meaning of this phrase, pointing out that the heart is usually thought of as the wellspring of love, or, for the audience of people who want to repeatedly punch a bag as hard as they can, of willpower. There's definite truth to the metaphor. Our emotional core (or "souls" in the most pragmatic use of the term) nourish us the way that our cardiac hearts do. The Yins of our desires and loves and the Yangs of our despairs and hatreds provide the beauty and texture of human life. They perpetuate the drama; they write the story. Words are tools, and the heart is a perfect way to refer to the soul if you have nothing else to relate it to. Thus, the way we live our lives makes the metaphor true: it is a qualitative part of the experience because we need it and words like it to conceptualize and communicate very esoteric things. They're how we understand ourselves, which kind of makes it true when I say that beating red vessel of soapy red electricity is  the symbolic equivalent of the internal fire that drives us through existence.

We think of champion athletes and survivors of illnesses as having needed great heart to overcome their challenge, whereas someone who is caring and compassionate to his or her close ones as having a big heart. A person charitable to strangers, animals, or the planet is equipped with an open heart--as though the body's blood-pumping motor also fuels the motivations and attractions of one's life. Quitters have little heart: weak hearts pump less oxygen to less living cells, keeping less of them alive. The loveless are broken-hearted, wondering if their internal furnace will ever again alight for another, or if it's coals will be stoked no longer, doomed beyond repair.

Hearts want to be together. They want to understand each other, to enjoy the journey together. And even when we soak them in booze, score them with scars, stain them with smoke, or sink them with desire, they still want to collect together like fireflies, they want to beat on each other through chests pressed together.

Don't worry, hopeless romantics. This may only happen once in 650,000 five-card poker hands, but it does happen. (A pair happens once in every 21 five-card hands. Keep dating.)

All hearts face solitude, the pain of isolation, the fear of us against the cold fate of the universe. A big measure of how we treat other's hearts is how we treat our own during these unavoidable bouts of loneliness. It's in these times that we so often overlook self-love. We equate it with arrogance and are therefore scared of it, so we compare ourselves to other people and judge ourselves for not meeting our unrealistic expectations. We forget that hearts unable to warm their own lives can't warm others; that the heart reinhales the blood it expels. The heart must sustain itself.

Our irrational mind has discovered behaviors to help us hide from that loneliness. The media makes us feel connected and the self-medication helps us feel distracted. When applied responsibly (which for me always means as wide a circle of responsibility as you can), these things are helpful ways to sustain emotional balance. Sometimes an escape is warranted. But when we overindulge in our defense mechanisms, they ease the pain and ennui in diminishing returns until you still feel bad and maybe now have a bad habit. 

Discipline and balance--and having compassion for yourself while exercising them--are skills that should be practiced to sustain a fulfilling emotional life. For as long as your heart can pump, anyway.

For as long as it can? For as long as it wants to? For as long as it's restless, wants more, isn't finished, has the juice? For how long?

In an essay titled "Joyas Voladoras", writer Brian Doyle says, "Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

"If it's okay with you I'm just gonna sit in this exact spot for a month or so."

"Relax bartender. This is only my 86,753rd flower this morning."

For how long? Who knows. Who wants to know. It's really only important that the heart does it all, sustaining us for however long we go, keeping us awake and moving forward. Skipping or bruising or rebuilding or clenching in triumph. Making tomorrow happen.

Personally, if the metaphor's true, and the symbol equals the organ, I'll take those two billion metaphysical heartbeats. Or maybe the metaphor is way off proportionally. Maybe two billion clicks of the ticker really buys you four billion moments of life, or ten billion bits of love, or forty billion bolts of will. Maybe the heart in our chest can project a light on our unseen selves wider than edges can stretch.

Could be truth, could be idealism, could be my neocortex once again overmisunderstanding something my heart can't articulate, could be "could be" doesn't matter. But maybe that's the only real disconnect in the metaphor of the heart in my chest and the heart in my soul: One heart has limits because it exists in a reality of limits. I'm not sure the other one does.