Is your life more than a resting heart rate?
The human heart is a high-performing and robust muscle. It outperforms artificial alternatives. In states of rest, it beats 70 to 80 times a minute, which equals 5 to 6 litres of blood, being pumped through our body. However, this is not a fixed number. During exercises our heartbeat accelerates to 200 times per minute. The heart increases it output to more than 20 litres per minute to supply our organs and muscles with enough nutrients and oxygen.
Each second of each day our heart performs in this way, with no days off and no signs of being tired. Maye that is the reason we associate passionate efforts with pouring your heart into it or showing heart.
By calculating how many times our heart has beaten for us in our entire life until this very moment, we would get an incredible high number. However, this number would possibly shrink, by calculating during how many of those beats we really felt alive. Sure, life does not only consist of moments and hours that make our hearts race and make us enjoy every beat, but it seems we too often chase careers, things, people and shiny goals, that do not disturb the rhythm of our hearts out of joy.
Often those are rather things we call in hindsight a waste of heartbeats. As Steve Jobs said: “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.”
If the heart has this special knowledge or not, we should consider the power within our heart and ask ourselves if we use them wisely.
Do we feel our heart beating excited when driving to work? Is there joy in our chest during leisure activities? Or do we just sit in front of the TV, streaming Netflix, scrolling up and down and swiping left and right, while the beats count down? Sometimes we do not even know what excites us and what makes us feel alive. Still, we cling to that life.
The power within our heart can make us reach mountain tops, swim through seas and fill us with such power, that we are able, to show our very best. We are all writing our biographies, consciously or not. At some point later in life, reminiscing about what we filled our days and pages with, we should feel the urge of diving back into those pages and days and reliving them again, simply because we felt so alive, we truly savoured each beat.
Our life should feel like more than a resting heart rate.
