A single heart
There are things that we take upon ourselves, emotions, feelings, guilt’sfs, that are not ours alone to bear. We are as an entity a collection of neurons and synapses that make of itself a whole, but of that whole we add experience, we add history to what was once a single heart. We bring within our province of governance another’s way of thinking, and we love them for the change. They bring nuance to a greyed canvas. They add a splash of color to an otherwise white washed wall. In essence … they enhance us to one degree or another, for better or worse they enhance us, and we cannot fault them for that.
There is within every single one of us a capacity, that is unknown to any other species on this planet, that capacity is empathy. What is empathy, its defined as this “The ability to understand and share the feelings or pain of another”. We hurt when others are hurting, we love when others are loving, we can see and understand joy in the laughter of a young woman or man newly in love, and we can rejoice in it. It’s not ours but we can rejoice in it because we see it for what it is, a single heart evanescing as it joins with another
I have seen hearts broken and hearts mended, I have seen hearts rent asunder and hearts made whole buy the simple act, nay emotion of empathy, there are 100,000,000,000,000 yes that’s 100 trillion connections that are connections throughout our synapses and neural linkages that make us … us. These connections have made us do atrocious things, they have made us hate, they have made us war upon each other. They have made us do things that would go far beyond any and all measure of a moral compass, they have led us astray of the underlying fundamental fact that we are all human, and that we err. That we make mistakes that as a species we are left wanting when weighed and measured against any gain that we may make as a whole.
But I have also seen this. A man that I admire do right by a wife and two daughters that he absolutely adores, and another man with a wife and two sons (one of wich he named after me) although I’ll never truly understand why he thought me worthy of such an accolade, because by any measure I can’t help but find myself wanting in that regard but I am eternally grateful for the namesake. I can only bring myself back to the title
A Single Heart
I believe that we as a whole, a human whole shares a single heart, we may disagree, we may argue, we may at times come to war with one another, but in the end I believe without rancor, without remorse, and with no other recourse other than the utter ruination of our species we will have no other understanding to bear witness to the history of mankind other than this. That we are of One Heart, we must be. The future is not an extrapolation of the past