Heart Healthy

 

 

It dawned on me yesterday that we're all living on the same planet but experiencing it completely differently. I was thinking about this and relating it specifically to languages, my flatmate and I have very different ideas about who the Friends characters are. How is this relevant?

  It starts with the fact that my flatmate and I are of different nationalities. I'm English and he's Spanish. I walked into the living room the other day to find myself looking at David Schwimmer's face, now I recognised his physical portrayal of the loveable oaf Ross Geller but I didn't identify with the voice coming out of his mouth at all. What have they done with my Ross? Is what I was thinking. I almost said, 'this is a lot more enjoyable in English yanno,' to my ensconced in his own version of Friends flatmate but then I stopped myself just in time. I stopped because I remembered a conversation I had with a different individual of Spain about how Friends only feels like Friends to him when he watches the American actors running about on the screen with their mouths open and closing but with their real voices hidden behind a Latino voice over actor. If you’re a Friends fan then you'll know that the six principal characters feel as familiar to you as your own friends do and the language you know them in is who they are to you. It seemed a bit mean to tell my flatmate that he was having a second rate Friends experience, he was having a nice time.

  My point here is that we're all watching the same things but from varying angles. I step onto my yoga mat and look forward to thirty minutes of peace and calm, someone else steps onto a yoga mat and looks forward to thirty minutes of boring poses. We then meet in the pub and have a heated discussion which results in someone being called 'snotty.' I feel that as groups of populations we have become very aware of what we think and how we feel but are not very aware of the person sitting next to us at work, we're all on the same planet, we're in the same office but they're in their universe and I'm in mine and we won't meet in the middle until we accept that we must travel to a middle ground and talk things out. It is of my entirely insignificant mind that we often forget to communicate and to empathise, we forget to do the right thing because we're so focussed on what's happening in our individual universes and more often than not in today's cut and thrust world we're forgetting to live, we're also forgetting that other people are capable of enhancing our lives, not everyone is out to hinder things for us.  

 

  I sometimes find myself feeling tied to a career clock, must do this, must do that, mustn't swan off to another country, must start saving for a pension by the time I hit my 30th birthday. The only tick-tock-tick-tock I'm really tied to is the one beating inside my chest and that clock likes action, it likes movement. It likes to be understood and cared for too. My heart, like hearts everywhere in all of the billions of universes millennia wide has on occasion forgotten to empathise and to understand its heartly counterparts, but, but, but, but I am making a pledge to carry about an understanding and forgiving heart. This heart of mine will not screech out 'eeeeeeee ya snotty you' when it doesn't understand another heart beating all alone in another chestly confinement. My heart will opt to communicate instead and by doing so will allow its best friend and close neighbour, the brain, to release nice heart healthy doses of dopamine and serotonin whilst it's support network, the arms and legs, walk around showing the eyes all of the magical sights along the way as the ears take in tinkling, pretty music signalling a story that is just about to begin - with the most colourful and stunning set of lights guiding the way.