Nucleus

I’ll start with the answer. I believe it is summed up in totality by a single word: heart. 

Heart is that place in the center, that grand junction of bodily fluids, the binding emotion of love, the genesis of life force. 

Heart is where it starts and where it finishes, either for the good or for the wretched. Heart is a place where tensions hold together. It is where love issues out both metaphysically and physically. It both represents the ties between reason and emotion and somehow simultaneously is literally that place. We can measure this organ in our chest with the 21st centuries finest detection systems and yet so much remains a mystery. The heart has its own nervous system and is intrinsically tied with our emotional state. We can predict with an astonishing degree of accuracy whether we are going to become ill by a simple metric based on the timing in between heart beats. 

Knowing the mechanics of our life organ is only half the story.

The pattern of our chest rhythms are poeticized in drama as the end of many long days of fighting in a hospital ward come to a dramatic conclusion with the thump-thump-thump of the EKG. It signifies when the story begins and ends. 

The heart is the center of suffering and the center of love. 

It’s by no means obvious how someone can reconcile the tension between what “is” and what “ought.” This is a deep question. We both occupy a value structure and a physical structure. These are contradictory domains; what exists physically cannot do the job of telling you what the ending of a story should be. It is the confluence of the matter we’re made of and the things that matter to us. 

Religions and traditions and classic tales of the hero overcoming the villain smooth out the dynamic through the use of drama. The movie theater and cathedral can both facilitate religious experience. And most of us are okay with that. It’s probably a good thing less too many of us go mad, though a path that for me I find more and more compelling, come what may. 

The material world cannot compel the heart to act. Other hearts in pain have the sole ability to do that. 

The heart then is a vessel, made of something that occupies our material world yet can somehow contain empathy, hatred, and everything in between. The heart is a physical container for something physics cannot explain. It is a place where these two forces condense and yet cannot fully be on and another. Matter and those things which matter swirl around a heart nucleus like electron fields that interact but never touch. 

It’s a dance. 

And in order to tango, we have to be willing to exist as creatures steeped in a mystery, and not theoretically. Because you have a heart. And to have a heart for someone else is a notion we have no problem entertaining regularly, but if we begin to unlock the nature of our figurative and literal speech when it comes to the heart, we may realize we’ve just taken the red pill.