I remember in high school health class learning how to check my pulse. I could never find mine in my wrist and I often couldn’t even feel it in my neck no matter how much I strained and hunted with my fingertips. My beating heart was alive then as it is now but it was so young, so quiet in its beat, so unshowy with its arrogant youth that just is and always will be.
Now, nearing 50, my heart pounds with a drumbeat of old age and shouts its demands to me to listen and take notice. I don’t even have to feel with my fingertips for my pulse because sometimes it is so fast and furious, no longer the quiet hum of my adolescent heart.
So, for now, a heart monitor is keeping track of things, mysterious rhythms, uncertain beats. I feel I am making a mix tape for the doctor; but, no matter how full of song and sound, it won’t track the things I know of my heart. Only I can tell the doctor what it beats for, who it beats for and a history of love flutterings it has felt since I was a little girl.
What a wonderful history of my life that could be found in my heart! But the love it knows cannot be accessed with this monitor taped to my chest.
We often talk about the lines on our face revealing something of our lives -- the laughter, the days in the sun, the frowns, the worry. But what of my life is recorded on my heart? What does it show of my life? How I have loved? How I have feared? How I have worried?
And, of course, my heart, is cast directly from my mother’s, as if she spent nine months molding it after her own. No matter what my mother and I think or what we eat, or how much we relax and live stress-free lives, our blood pressure will rise and our hearts will race.
Sometimes for a while we become only our bodies and can think of nothing else. I’m trying to be mindful of my worries, to practice mindfulness, to be full of my own mind without overthinking.
But this is a paradox, an impossible task. So often my wayward, worrying, unmindful mind will simply, not mind me.
Words, however, do. They listen and relax me.
Ink and paper soothe me.
This truth is summed up nicely in T.H. White’s, The Once and Future King, which I discovered when reading Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life:
“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn.”
For now, I will look for the lesson. Always. Because really, all we can ever do, is learn.
Michelle.. I’m going through the exact same thing with my heart and blood pressure. It’s all related to my pre menopause Amd it’s sooooo scary and awful. It causes my health anxiety to be so much worse it’s unbearable. I pray for peace for you as it’s so frustrating when they can’t find anything ( worse if they did ) but the heart palpitations and racing heart keep me up and wake me up and find me throughout my day as well. Anyway I wanted to say I completely understand and recognize
Poetic prose.