Joyas Voladras

Our hearts are probably our most important muscle/organ. They're only about the size of a fist but they pump blood through our bodies 24/7, 365 days of every year only ever stopping when we die. That's a lot of work. In the essay Joyas Voladras we learn about many hearts including the engine of a heart trapped inside the hummingbird. The hummingbird is a magnificent creature. Their hearts beat 10 times a second (while normal human hearts beat a mere 1-3 per second). Not only does the hummingbirds heart beat almost 10 times faster than ours but "a hummingbird's heart is only the size of a pencil eraser." With a heart like that it's no surprise that hummingbird's don't live to be a 100 years old. Hummingbirds live a fast ambitious life and "The price of their ambition is a life closer to death." It is said that "Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old." This was one of my favorite quotes in the essay because it makes you think. I believe that Brian Doyle was trying to get the readers to think about is how they spend their 2 billion beats. The tortoise and the hummingbird are obviously two different extremes and I don't think that we are meant to be like either one. We as humans are given the happy medium in this situation. Although we don't live to be as old as a tortoise we are given more time than just 2 lousy years. Hummingbirds may live a fast life but it's a bit of a meaningless life. When reading and re-reading this quote I initially thought of a video we saw last week in class. In the video, Neil Pasricha discusses his 3 A's of Awesome: Attitude, Awareness, and Authenticity. Basically, he talks about how it's important that we live the little time we have here on Earth with a positive attitude, that we are aware of all the awesome things, especially during dark times, and that more importantly we have authenticity, and no matter what we stay true to ourselves. I believe Brian left us with a similar message. He gets you thinking about those 2 billion heart beats. In the last paragraph of his essay, Doyle talks about how "all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can “but even though we are torn, and even though we build walls we can't stop being aware of things good or bad. Our walls topple " in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children." With this in mind, the answer to our question “What does it mean to be human " becomes clear; we are not humans because we have hearts and organs, we are human because of how we live. "So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment." As humans we are aware of many things. We know when to build our walls up, we remember the pain but at the same time we remember the good. We can't help being aware, and we can't help that our walls fall down. We are curious beings with the need to share with others. We have empathy. All these qualities effect how we live, and all these qualities are what make us human.