Your heart, the one pumping in your body. How crucial is it? For yourself, it must be, without it pumping at the correct level, you might be so sick that you faint. Worse, you pass out and die.
Perhaps, important to others too? Well, your physical well-being is baseline for a good body, without which it’s rather challenging to be yourself and in relationship with others.
Heart biological
However we put it, the heart is a biological thing. It is a physical thing, meat, flesh, muscle, veins etc. that sits near the top of your body along with and in connection with so many other things in your body. In a very simplistic term, it pumps blood (and oxygen) to the rest of the body.
There is no “myth” about the biological or physical heart. In the operatig theatre or such other procedure, the heart can be seen with the eyes, touched and manipulated in your fingers and other surgical instruments.
Heart mental
There is also no denial that the heart is also referred to as somewhere our thoughts takes place, decisions are worked out.
Wait, that does not sound right. How can thought processes – the “thinking” thing – happen in the heart?
Figuratively, we often refer to the emotional part of who we are, or going through, to the heart. In some ways, the biological heart is somewhat impersonal, or that an external person can deduce the personality of the person with that heart. But we have a “window” into that person by referring to the mental part of their heart, in the way the person relates to others by speaking about how their heart feels, reacts to situations etc.
Measuring the heart
Being curious about smartwatches for reading your pulse etc. I found out further that many of them use optical light: by momentarily emitting such light onto your skin, there is much it can find out about your bodily health. For more exact readings, other methods can be used. We can get blood pressure monitor, even the same models that are used in hospital and health centres.
I did some test on such gadgets and was shocked, amazed and impressed by how some of them inteprete the readings. Things like stress, variability, cohesion and recovery. By shocked, I mean horrified that something else could make such kind of deduction about a person without actually needing to know the person. And also shocked because letting it do that seems to have sold my right to my privacy.
By amazed, I am quite taken aback by the range of information it could deduce from such readings. Similar to but in contrast to “shocked”, the amazement is in the direction of … it is giving me information that a specialist does, e.g. a physiotherapy, doctor, psychologist, pastor, health coach etc.
To be impressed by such gadgets, I mean they can be of use, or even mildly reliable, in that I could make use of some aspects of how they work to change some of activities, my hobbies (or lack or more of), food etc. That is, if I am minded about improving my health and general well-being (or my heart).
The whole person
And here, there are two points. I am writing this because I have learned something about me going through this process.
Our body is telling us something, we don’t need to go far, or go to some specialists to discover who we are. Who we are is in “our body”.
The second point is that our “faculties” – body / physical, mental, spritual, behaviour, biological patterns etc. are all linked to the extent that someone who is always on the go, rather loud, full of ideas etc. might be one where their biological balance in their heart is at such a kind of composition that lends themselves acting and thinking that way. At the end other, someone whose biological heart might usually be pumping at a calmer rate most of the time. For such a person, the fact they would prefer to do one thing at a time, prefer to be with freinds and socialise rather than undertaking a series of high-intensity activities, goes in line with their “heart” profile. That, of course, is a to-and-fro situation. A person who might be laid-back, reserve, quiet, resting, is one whose heart has been “attuned” to lower level of life intensity.
The thing is, how a person reacts in a situation, is very much a matter of their heart, their whole heart. Even their life choices and decisions have been a matter of their heart: for example, a person might prefer to do their laundry early in the morning, then meet with friends, then return home for lunch, then catch up with film-on-demand, then go to do food shopping, then check their emails before cooking dinner and rest for the night. For another person who has the same collection of activities, they might do them over 3 or 4 days. Knowingly or not, the two persons lead their lives very differently is, in a major way, a matter of their heart.
