In one of my more thoughtful moods today, I suddenly became aware — for really no particular reason — of the steady rhythm of my heartbeat inside my chest.
Listening to the regular, metronomic undertone “lubb-Dubb” beating inside my breast I was suddenly overcome by great emotion… A feeling of overwhelming love and of enormous gratitude swept over me !
All of a sudden I was filled with the most tender of affections for that little fist-sized muscle-tissue nestled deep inside the cavern of my rib-cage called “the heart” which, ever since the moment I was conceived inside the womb of my long departed, beloved mother, has been at ceaseless work … much like a relentless, self-energised, non-stop mechanical dynamo-powered pump that … thank God and touch wood too till date in all of my 60-odd years of my life … has never anything like even remotely come close to what in industrial parlance is known to modern factory maintenance-engineers as the sudden and dreaded “machine breakdown”.
The soft and comforting sound of my very own heartbeat got me then thinking philosophically about the “arythmetics” of cardiac function.
For no reason then other than perhaps ontological wonder, I realised I was silently but efficiently doing the following sums inside my head for my own benefit:
1. No. of human heartbeats on average in a minute : 72
2. No. of minutes in a day of 24 hours : 24X 60
3. No. of days in a calendar year : 365
5. Average life span in no. of years of an Indian male today : 71
6. Total no. of heartbeats expected in a lifetime for an Indian male : 72X 60 X 24 X 365 X 71 = 2.7 billion heartbeats !
Now then at my present age, I have come to reckon, my little brave heart has already functioned up to about 90% of its estimated expected average lifetime working capacity!
It beats very strong still no doubt but I guess it now beats what the poet Longfellow described as “funeral marches to the grave”.
Of course… I tell myself however that I have still at least another quarter of a billion more heartbeats to listen to in the years ahead and to continue enjoying their wonderful almost musical sounds in the average timespan I have yet left in a lifetime …
I convince myself thus of the philosophic truth that has revealed itself to me this blessed day : Count your life not by years but by heartbeats!
With that humbling yet proud thought shared with you all today, let me sign off … with a heart still singing the same song it has been singing all these years to the magical rhythms of its unceasing beat.
Sudarshan Madabushi