This Stupid Heart Untrusted Failure Of an Organ Power over Brain and Body Unfairly designed To inhibit Reason and Logic While providing The motivation For life Source of greatest Joy and happinesses Without equal Ask Icarus, He Knows. Above all Else Protect Your Traitorous Heart. It is your greatest ally, Your fire, Your sail. And it's power is infinite. As are you.
Mister Spock, I think, would approve of this essay.
What a curious thing our heart is. The Bible calls it treacherous, as in untrustworthy. But the catalog of music to which I have bathed in wants me to listen to the happy little voice, follow it, trust it like it’s a compass. And I guess it kind of is. But the things it guides me to are not usually the course of wisdom. They are the places of momentary electricity, thrills, and the effervescence of life. Good in moderation, no doubt. But our hearts seem blind to more than a few moments into the future at any given time. I suppose that is why we are endowed with the sense of reason, as represented by our mind. We should feel passion and desire, but we have to temper and guide them with love, justice, wisdom, and kindness.
There is no place in happiness for selfish indulgence. Not real, lasting happiness.
The irony? That when I discover those moments of greatest fulfillment and generosity. I just happen to find myself laughing with someone I love and who loves me and we are working should-to-shoulder to accomplish something for the greater good — the heart enhances that experience and makes the moment greater than the sums of it’s parts. This is why no moment is as golden in its experience as it is in memory.
What a contradiction we are. We think (well, we are told anyway) absolute freedom means absolute happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment. But in truth, the more we restrict our actions and thinking to what is best for everyone, the better it is for us personally. More happiness in giving and all.
Among the truest idioms is: the absence of rules is the enemy of art.
And isn’t living our life an art? Relationships, masterpieces to be admired. Love, an oeuvre to be chipped and revealed from the marble slab of the soul over the course of our lives?
We NEED the rules of goodness and kindness, patience, self-control and joy in order to complete a masterwork worthy of the life we have been given. It is only by restricting that figurative organ of impulse that we truly become all that we can and should be. The perfect state of man is when he reaches his intended purpose to the fullest degree. Our hearts help us to reach that aspiration by fueling our zest for living. But unless we bend that to the will of good, they instead lead us down a dark path of thoughtless passion that benefits no one.
“Be happy, noble heart, be blessed for all the good thou hast done and wilt do hereafter, and let my gratitude remain in obscurity like your good deeds.”
Edmond Dantés comment after, in obscurity, saving Msr Morrel and his family.
“You may, in time, find that having a thing is not so as desirable a circumstance as wanting a thing.” - Mister Spock
Once, riding the rail in Ghana, I met a giraffe and I asked him, ‘why are you so tall?’ Chewing the acacia leaves, he said to me in a ponderous voice, ‘Why is the world so short?’
This concludes today’s lesson. Be and do good. Enjoy your heart, but be wary of it’s leadership.
What do you think Mister Spock would say?