an odd kind of circulation
I learned something about the heart recently that feels embarrassingly obvious now that I know it.
For some reason, I always thought the heart was simply the thing supplying everything else. It pumps oxygen-rich blood around the body, keeps everything running, and presumably just gets on with it. I never stopped to consider that the heart is muscle too. It needs oxygen. It needs blood.
So, in a rather lovely bit of biological reciprocity, the heart pumps the blood that ultimately keeps itself alive.
I haven't been able to leave that sentence alone.
There is something about it that complicates the way I usually think about giving. We tend to speak about giving as expenditure. You give your time, your energy, your attention, your love. Something leaves you. Too much leaves you and eventually you become depleted.
Which is true, obviously. There are people, obligations, even entire periods of life that can leave us feeling thoroughly wrung out.
But then there are things that seem to behave in the exact opposite way.
You can spend three hours making something and somehow come away with more energy than you started with. You can give an afternoon to someone you love and never once think of it as an afternoon lost. Writing takes something out of you, as does teaching, creating, caring for people, learning something simply because you find it interesting.
And yet some of these things return us to ourselves.
How strange.
To expend yourself and somehow become fuller in the process.
I suppose we have become very good at talking about protecting our energy. Protect your peace. Guard your time. Don't give too much of yourself away.
Sensible advice, certainly.
But I wonder if we can become so preoccupied with avoiding depletion that we begin treating everything that requires effort as though it must necessarily cost us.
Surely that isn't true.
Some things are tiring and still nourishing. Some people require effort and are still worth loving. Some work asks a great deal from us and, inconveniently, we would be less ourselves without it.
Maybe the question isn't whether something takes energy from us.
Everything worth doing probably does, to some extent.
Maybe the better question is what happens after we give it.
Do we feel diminished?
Or does something, somehow, circulate back?
I like that the heart does not seem particularly concerned with this distinction. Giving and receiving are simply parts of the same process. It keeps the body alive, and somewhere in the middle of doing so, life makes its way back to it.
Perhaps some things are like that.
We give ourselves to them because they matter.
And, rather conveniently,
they give us back to ourselves.