Every Beat
Yesterday, I saw a TV programme about a man whose parents left him in care at a very young age. His parents moved away and had more children. The first-born went on to work in a hospital, to serve in World War 1, got wounded, got sent home, healed, and went back to the war. To die.
I was wondering then about all the people who have ever lived, and who live now. Their lives, their deaths, their meaning. This man on the TV programme had a story. We all do. I have mine and I don’t yet know its meaning.
Sometimes I wallow, sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I eat carrots, sometimes I eat broccoli and sometimes I eat pizza. Sometimes I’m alone and sometimes I’m with people. Sometimes I’m with dogs, sometimes I’m feeding the birds.
None of those define me. Nothing I think defines me, no more than I can be defined as a ‘carrot eater’. No thoughts define me.
I get scared, I get tickled. I love and am loved. I lose and feel lost. I win and I feel proud.
I feel lots of things. I can feel things from my memories, as if they are happening now. I can feel things from other people’s stories. I can feel things from the future that have yet to happen, and probably never will.
The things in my head are like smells. Some things stink. Some things are sweet. None of that is ‘me.’
Every single beat of my heart can bring a new smell in my head. Every single beat of my heart can bring a new thing to do. Any single beat can make a difference beyond my rib cage. It can ripple out in ways I will never know.
I’m amazed when I look at what I can do and have done, even with smells in my head.
A few months ago, I was ‘geeking-out’ all Saturday on documentaries about quantum physics and stumbled across one documentary on the science of smell. According to this one scientist, research suggests that the sense of smell in the brain is made by the vibration, the sound of the molecule in our heads. We hear smells! The human brain is the most sophisticated and complex thing we’ve ever seen in the universe. And one of those is inside my skull!
Everything I see, feel, taste, hear and smell is made sense of in my head. The meaning of everything comes from inside my head. On my eye, everything I see is upside down; in my head it’s turned the right way up. All of what I experience is so varied, so rich and so… miraculous.
Every heartbeat. Of every heart. We never know what’s coming. We never know the ripples of that heartbeat.
I’ll try to make mine kind. Loving. Honest. Human.
Maybe that’s the point.
