Matters of the Heart

We all live in a brainiac world, to be sure, but the heart remains the emotional, spiritual center of our being. It’s still such a symbol of love and emotion, with our language sprinkled with metaphors invoking the heart as the source of empathy, emotion, consciousness, reason and purpose. Your heart can go out to someone, you can feel a heavy heart in times of sorrow, you can have a change of heart, hold something close to your heart, be sick at heart and get to the heart of any issue. You can feel things from the bottom of your heart, be cursed with a cold heart or possess a heart of gold. You can have your heart set against something and even have a heart-to-heart talk with someone who is your heart’s desire. Yet sometimes we go weeks without thinking about our physical hearts — each the size of a fi st that weighs maybe 12 ounces. On a typical day it will beat 100,000 times. Touch a fi nger to your wrist or the carotid artery in your neck. Now try to imagine the medical marvel of that lumpy muscle that does not resemble any Valentine’s heart you’ve ever seen. If taken care of properly, it will faithfully beat nearly 3 billion times over a normal lifetime

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