Look after your heart

You need to look after your heart, that piece of muscle that keeps the life force coursing through your arteries and veins and capillaries.  Without that comforting thump in your chest, without that pulse in your wrist or that green blip on the electrocardiograph you are not going to last long at all, perhaps just a matter of seconds.

You need to look after your heart, nurture it, care for it, treat it like a friend, a lover perhaps and make sure that it is in the best of working orders as you are going to rely on it through thick and thin, night and day, eighty times a minute until one day it is going to stop.  The thing is that you have no idea when that is going to be, twenty years time, early next year or perhaps even tomorrow?  What you can be absolutely certain of, however, is that your heart will beat a whole number of times.  It will be an integer (not a negative one), a real number a natural number and not a fraction or a decimal.  Your heart is not going to beat 0.7 of a beat or 3/16ths of a beat, it will be da-dum or nothing, silence, a flat line.

In your life your heart is going to beat three billion times, more for some and less for others.  But what if this number was more than just a whole number, what happens if it was a certain number, a fixed and absolute number?  It must be, your heart is going to beat a whole number and nothing more, not one beat more and not one beat less.  What happens then if at birth your heart is pre-programmed with a set number, coded into your DNA, 3,363,842743 for example?  What happens if there is an absolute cut off etched into the vehicle identification plate riveted to the back of your own device, written down in your design specification and ticked off on your own quality control sheet?  If this were true would you behave any differently?

If this were true you would probably stop and panic a little.  Your heart beat would race for a few seconds and you would feel the slightest of pain in your chest until you realise that you haven’t been counting and that you have no idea what number you have got up to.  But then it would dawn on you that it made no difference as you have no idea when the final beat is coming.  Is it this one, the next one or have you got millions yet to go?

Then you might think about all the time you had spent in the gym and all that time you had spent pounding the pavements, jogging along and raising your heartbeat to a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty and getting into the red zone.  Was it all a waste of time?  Have you in fact been sloughing off your heartbeats at twice the normal rate, literally killing time?  Yes but you will say, those who exercise are more healthy and live longer or is it just that those who are disposed to jog have a higher pre-determined beat number anyway and those with a propensity for pies are already programmed for less?

Who knows but the question is: are you prepared to take the risk?  Will you quicken the rhythm in the hope you will live longer, or will you savour every precious beat that you will never get back, or is it all decided for you well in advance.  Anyway, I must stop now as you never know, this might be my last.