An old friend told me recently that the brain was an appliance, like a microwave.  It’s a miracle, but it’s only good for certain tasks.  If you expect it to freeze anything, you’re in for frustration.

But that frustration drives us.  We go through our lives striving to answer questions that the brain isn’t built to answer.

The solution, he told me, is the heart.

The heart doesn’t have any senses.  Does it?  The Chinese use one word for heart and mind, 心.  You’d think they would be rubbing the philosophical significance of this in on the rest of us, but I’m not convinced they’re often aware of the difference.  If the difference was on the surface, then surely they’d hear about it as they arrive, strangers in a strange land.  But this difference is at a deeper, root metaphorical level.

We can choose to ponder a path into the future, or we can take the Kierkegaardian approach of observing that there is no path to ponder: life can be over at any instant, and there is no predicting the future.  I can’t help but plan.  Still, I stop my frenetic planning at times to consider that all this is empty of meaning.  Like Kiergaard, I have to consider the possibility that a roof tile will blow off a neighboring building and strike me dead.  If not a roof tile, the car ahead of me.  Or the cancer that is silently growing within.  Or just despair.

The heart does have senses.  All of them.  I can listen to it, but my heart sings a funeral dirge.  On some days, I am drawn down by it.  On other days, I recognize that this song — however sad — is a celebration of life.  In endings, are beginnings.  There is no alpha and omega.  There is alpha and omega and alpha again.  Some day, things will truly end, I suppose.  And when that happens, nothing will change that I have been.