The Future of the Heart

The heart is composed of its own kind of muscle called cardiac muscle. Cardiac muscle has similarities in its form and function to the other two kinds of muscle in the human body, smooth and striated. Smooth muscle is generally found in organs and is associated with involuntary movements. Striated muscle is also called skeletal muscle because it is the type of muscle that moves your skeleton when you really want to get the ice cream from the carton to your mouth. Striated muscle can be moved voluntarily to eat ice cream. Cardiac muscle is generally not thought of as voluntary, as the heart indeed beats whether or not you are conscious or paying attention or lazy or are running a marathon; however, the cardiac muscles are striated like voluntary muscles. This has led some to wonder if there might be a capacity within the heart that could be accessed by a conscious willing. Perhaps there is a future in which the heart becomes a part of the human body more like a limb and less like a liver or kidney. Furthermore, we know the heart plays a certain role in the feeling life of human beings, has the capacity for sensing and communicates with other parts of the body, including the brain, through nerves and hormones. It seems the heart might play an essential role in our future as an organ that will allow us to sense the humanity in the other and even help us take action in the service of our fellow human beings. Perhaps if we can begin to view the heart as an organ that we can consciously and voluntarily engage in the activity of perceiving the needs, the feelings, the motivations of other individuals, we could be on a path to the more tolerant and productive world we envision. In these times, it seems to be an essential endeavor to do all we can to foster a more compassionate society--active and engaged. Even if the heart is not on a transformative trajectory toward becoming a voluntary organ of profound and energetic empathy, the imagination of this region in your chest as capable of reaching out to your fellow human beings in that act of "brotherly and loving communion"-- this imagination alone will feed our love and caring for one another. And that is really and truly the only salve for the troubles of the world. We have seen the paintings and heard the sayings and songs of the heart as a metaphor, and perhaps it is really more than a metaphor. We have the opportunity to shape now what we will certainly inherit in the future-- our own hearts seems to me to be a good place to start.