Places Of The Heart

Do not rush to your next appoint­ment. Slow down. Your heart is look­ing for some­thing it needs to grasp. We live in our heads too much. We make deci­sions. Things get checked off the “to do” list. At the end of the day we tell our­selves that the tasks were accom­plished, and now we can rest, but the heart is still rest­less. It has been ignored all day long. With the TV, the phone, the com­puter, and the evening trip to the store, it will be ignored for the evening too.

The best part of life comes in “heart moments” of mem­o­ries and real­iza­tions. Despite the great accom­plish­ments of evolv­ing tech­nolo­gies, I am still a philo­sophic roman­tic. Things of the heart are more impor­tant than things of the head. Still, I get swept up in the com­mon wor­ship of analy­sis and the “bot­tom lines” of papers and pro­grams. My heart knocks on the door of my atten­tion a lit­tle louder these days. Maybe it is being post-fifty-five. Maybe it is just a lit­tle more insis­tent. Maybe it is there to remind me of the promises I made to myself ear­lier in life, that I would not lose the spirit of life as adven­ture and mys­tery — not prob­lems and solutions.

Places of the heart are found by skim­ming radio chan­nels and hear­ing brief excerpts of child­hood songs. They are found in movie moments, when run­ning the cable TV sta­tions, while killing time in a hotel. Some­times they hit when you open the door and notice the tem­per­a­ture out­side has warmed or cooled unex­pect­edly. Flow­ers, dust, can­dles, cloth­ing, stores, deserts, snow, spent jet fuel, wood stain, Dr. Pep­per, cof­fee, bacon, the sound of snow skis, 2:00 AM silence, sounds of child­hood sur­fac­ing in dreams…

It would take end­less life­times for the heart to find all for that which it searches. New lum­ber, old church build­ings, pop­corn in movie theaters…it is the domino effect of relaxed men­tal states. They are per­haps more present on week­ends, or maybe we are just more aware of them when not in the work trance. They are free for any­one and cer­tainly bound­less. They can come to you while you rock on the front porch or as you gaze out of the win­dow of a plane. Pay atten­tion. Heart-life tran­scends thought-life. Like life itself, it is one gift after another.