Late last night, just before bed, I nearly broke my brain.
The tweet from the poet Rasha Abdulhadi read, “Right now, in this moment, you can’t fake where your heart is. Pay attention to that.” Based on other tweets, I believe Abdulhadi was talking about where one’s heart is in relation to current global politics, but I chose to take the quote as it stood, on it’s own, without the additional context. It struck me as a profound question to consider – right now, in this moment, where is my unfakable and authentic heart?
Think about the question hard enough and it becomes difficult to separate the heart from the thinking mind. Think about it long enough and “in this moment, where is your heart?” morphs into “what are you thinking about?” But those feel like two different questions. I tried to come at the question from a different angle. I tried to ask myself, “what do you love?” That, too, feels like an entirely different question than “where is your heart?”
As I tried to think this through, I found myself answering the heart question with what I’m thinking about and where my preoccupations had bedded down for the evening – as though when not happily drunk on romantic love, the heart is a worrier and a chronicler of absence. I began to realize that my response is rooted not in what I currently love, but what I have loved. If it’s not with someone else, where is it? Can it be in things? Can it be in the present moment? Oh, how unsettling on a chilly Saturday evening to not know where one’s heart is – a problem of misplacement that seems more serious, both in weight and scope, than having misplaced my keys or an important tax document at tax time.
As I played around with this idea, I wanted to know how circumstance and experience change the definition of heart for different people. I tend to define it in terms of romantic love, but I suppose one could just as easily think of heart as family or passions or geography. Is it a question of absence vs. presence or varying degrees of fullness? Do the lovelorn define heart one way and the content or love-struck define it differently? I have to imagine that for people like my parents who have been with their partners for decades, it’s not a question that comes up very often, if ever. Why would it? Whereas for those of us who don’t have an obvious or easy answer, I suspect the question comes up in dozens of different and uncomfortable ways.
I felt (and still feel) stumped by this. No matter how hard I try to think through it, I begin to mix up the past and the present. I begin to give consideration to gradations of intensity and different sizes of heart. The best answer I can offer is that my heart is in my present life, but something about that answer feels unsatisfying and thin. Because the present moment feels decidedly different (a less intense beating) from those times when I knew, unequivocally, where my heart was, it feels as though this can’t be the same heart… Different hearts for different types of love? Same heart, but differently sized and apportioned sections of it?
And what of the past? How does that color our answers?
I tried to imagine asking this question of the people I might meet on dating sites. I tried to imagine having to answer this question from those people. Where is your heart in this moment? Given the context (a dating app where most people are in various stages of rebuilding from previous experiences), I suspect most people’s first reactions would be to answer a related but entirely different question: where would I like my heart to be? I suspect the optimists, the ones who’ve had good experiences in love, would define their future state as a vision built from the best pieces of their past (to my various exes, you’re welcome for that ;-). I suspect the more pessimistic people, the ones who’ve had less than pleasant experiences in love (you’re also welcome for that various exes ;-), may define their future state in terms of what they don’t want for the heart – what they’ve had and soundly rejected. Can this question be answered without drawing on the past? If our heart isn’t attached to someone in the present moment (because we’re out there seeking), and it hasn’t yet arrived in the Shangri-La of tomorrow, is it, by definition or some twist of logic, necessarily, inescapably stuck somewhere in the past? Stranded on that purgatorial road of “getting there”?
Re-reading Abdulhadi’s statement – two phrases proved challenging for me: “in this moment” and “pay attention to that.” In conjunction, those two phrases force me to acknowledge, that my romantic heart, in this present moment, is nowhere. It’s homeless. As such, quite naturally, what I’m left paying attention to, what I’m left trying to listen to, is some version of when it lived elsewhere. What I’m almost forced to pay homage to is some past version when the question wasn’t as complicated. All of which begs the question, does the heart need an object on which to focus in order for it to be present? Or, is it the opposite? Is the heart always present, and when we’re properly trained to do so, we can let the heart live in whatever space the present moment has built for it (a walk along the water, a run, a poem, a painting, a meal, a glass of wine)? Is this one of those strange ironies where not being consumed by love, where not having a singularly intense focus for the heart teaches us to love more things and in different ways?
I hadn’t planned on having such a deep conversation with myself on dreary Saturday evening (last evening). I had been scrolling through old photos, new dating profiles, and twitter on my phone. Google tells me that I’m nearing my 15GB limit. As such, I was trying to delete photos as a small way to free up space. In that process, I got sucked into looking, quite fondly, at pictures of the pets. I miss them all, and the intensity of that missing, the gravity of their emotional pull seemed tied to how much time has elapsed since they left my life: Murphy, then Zelle, then Paris, then Nick, and finally Kimbrough. None of those photos were deleted.
In those moments of scrolling, I suppose my heart was in this space of fond remembrance for my furry friends – which, when combined with the act of look at dating profiles, may have primed my brain to be astounded and almost broken by Abdulhadi’s tweet. My heart was not with these strangers on an app, and it also wasn’t fully in these places from my past – but there seemed to be a clear and tangible connection between the two. And because it was easier to think in terms of the pets – to treat the pets as a metaphor for partners, I began this thought experiment of wondering what looking for a new pet might feel like. Where is the heart in that process – and I was surprised by how close to the surface and influential my memories were. I would want cats like the cats I’ve had. I would want dogs like the dogs I’ve had. I realized that I can’t arrive at this moment (whether it’s a thought experiment of looking for a pet or the very real process of look for a partner) without having had those past moments. And that’s when it occurred to me that almost everyone out there who is in some mode of seeking is doing some version of asking where their heart has been, trying to determine if it’s still there, while being optimistic about where it might yet go. Everyone out there is coming from somewhere else – arriving with different sized hearts and differently weighted pasts with varying degrees of clarity and shading.