Heroes Not Zombies

Luckily, I’m not up much during the night anymore, but when I was a General Practitioner I was out and about in Edinburgh through the night pretty regularly. Much of the city was eerily quiet in the middle of the night, with hardly any traffic, or pedestrians, and just the occasional window lit in a few houses. I thought of those nights again when I read these lines by Wordsworth.

That’s exactly what night time felt like to me when I was out – the city was sleeping. But more than that, you could feel its heart lying still….by still, I don’t mean not beating, I mean that slow, calm relaxed beat which we can all experience, although some of us only experience it during sleep.

There’s a huge overlap for me between heart and soul. I don’t understand soul as an entity lurking somewhere hidden in the body….it’s more like a state, a condition, which we discover in what Iain McGilchrist calls the “betweenness”. Just as music can’t be reduced to a set of individual notes, but works because of melody, rhythm and harmony which all depend on the betweenness – between the notes….in the “movements”.

But I don’t consider the heart as an entity either. It is an entity more clearly than soul is, because you can see, touch, even hold the organ we call the heart in your hands. I’ve done that. No, you can’t reduce the human heart to what you can hold in your hands. The live, beating heart, surrounded by its own special neural network, emanating complex waves of electromagnetic radiation which influence the whole body, and even the bodies of others.

We humans use metaphors with great power. They’re a kind of magic. They turn what could otherwise seem merely mechanical and utilitarian into something enchanting and profound, something which gives us access to feelings and the unconscious.

We do need to still our beating hearts from time to time, to steady ourselves, to quieten down our inner and outer worlds.

And when we do we discover we can live a more full life, a life of heart and soul.