It’s just about a year since a heart-attack knocked me off my CASUAL perch (Carelessly Assured Serenely Uninterrupted Animate Life). A single year, I suppose, is not a whole lot of time for a commemoration, but the fact of my survival, and the alternative, make it seem a whole lot of lifetimes. All those little things that happen in everyday existence, all the hopes and dreams that continue to swirl inside your head and make life so much, well, life, none of that would exist at all for the last year if I had made my exit. How precious then is that space of time, how much worthy of a celebration!

Besides, I also completed my thirty-six sessions of cardiac rehab, becoming part of a select community of similarly aged men, plus (for some reason) a lesser number of women, all recently made conscious of their acute fragility this side of eternity. We had such a huge sense of something in common, as we hit the treadmills and exercise bikes, that we continually talked about going out for beer and pizza together. But when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves. I suspect it would have felt too much like a reunion of ghosts at the local funeral parlor!

So, instead, I will try to celebrate by writing something rising from the experience and I would never have thought of before: a dialogue between a man and his own heart. You see, you never think of your heart as separate from yourself, until gnaws in your chest like a wild dog trying madly to get out. That’s when you realize that the heart is a muscle with a life of its own, and you really have to start paying attention to it.

Oh, my dear heart, what did I ever do to you for you to treat me this way?

You never cared before, you took me entirely for granted!

But how was I to know? You were so quiet and gentle, always there day and night, with your peaceful little beat, you made me take you for granted! How was I to know you could get so angry? 

Give me a break! You were always saying creepy things like “Cross your heart and hope to die!” “Eat your heart out!” “I heart you!” You knew exactly how important I was. But it never occurred to you to figure out what really made me tick? If you had a muscle strain in your leg or arm you would talk about it non-stop. But the most serious muscle in your body, you thought I worked by magic.

C’mon now. Calm down. You’re taking it all too much to heart!  (Sorry, I thought that was funny!) I was always talking about you, and in a positive way! We always said, “Follow your heart,” “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t have.”  All that cool romantic stuff! You had to be pleased!

Yes, and what about, “The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse,” All that Jeremiah stuff! I would get so sick and tired hearing about how wicked I was. 

Well, yes, there is that. But you have to admit, you did lead me astray a number of times

Whaattt! It was nothing to do with me, it was you with your sick imagination, I’m just a supply of motion to the propeller, it’s you and your precious brain that steers the ship!

So, you’re totally innocent. You’ve never done anything wrong?

No, I have not. I am innocent, and you are a jerk.

Listen, you’re being far too literal about everything. When we say “heart” in casual conversation we’re using a metaphor for the deepest, most essential part of the self. We’re not talking about you, that eleven-ounce muscle about the size of an average fist lodged in our chest. You have to make allowance for human language use.

So, now I’m too stupid to understand when people are talking about me, and when they mean something else. Well, let me tell you, you don’t have a word for that something else, because you don’t know what it is. But in the meantime, the truth is I AM the most essential thing in your life, I am the main event, but you don’t give me the respect you should. That whole metaphor thing is your way of wriggling out of the facts

But you just said it was my brain that made me do stuff, and now you say you really are the mainspring of life. Which is it?

I’m not arguing the point with you. You started the whole conversation because you said I’d treated you poorly. The fact is you didn’t know what I do, and now when I showed you, you come on like I’m behaving badly. But, really, I’ve always been that way, the passion of your life at its core, and you’ve been totally fine with it. I just gave you a wake-up call and now you have to change your whole way of understanding. You have a lion of desire where you thought there was a sweet little puppy, and, more to the point, the lion’s no longer locked up in its cage.

That’s crazy, really crazy. I’m not sure I want to be talking to you like this. You suddenly become this lion all untamed, and about to tear itself free from me, but somehow you always were that way, and now it’s too late for me to do anything about it! What happened to “sweetheart,” to compassion, to the heart’s heart for the weak and wounded!

There you go again, saying stuff about me for things you actually can’t make sense of. Well, I would like to help you, I really would. And maybe I will feel better about it next week, or next year. But in the meantime, I have got your attention and that makes me happy. I’m just a muscle, like you say, and my operating life has a term limit, what do you say, a shelf life? All that other stuff you talk about, you’ll have to figure that out without me.

Well, that does make sense. I do see what you mean about my sloppy metaphors, making you responsible for things which we don’t have names for. So, what happens to those things when your angry lion does finally break free? Where will my real “heart” be then? 

I guess you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe, if you get the chance, you could even let me know too!