Busy and Fresh

I feel it is written with the same surprise every year.  But December is so busy.  This season is once again upon us.  Every year I think about Christmas and the month of December and wonder about why it does so much to people in both good and bad ways.

  You see it everywhere in this chaotic wintery world.  People can get really stressed out.  Winter driving conditions can be a legitimate new pace to get used to.  But in Minnesota you just shore up and get used to it again and it seems normal until late March. 

I’m talking more about the inner hype.  The expectation which seems to have come out of left field, and quickly.   When this became really clear to me as an adult, I began to ask why.  Sometimes people have really direct answers, and other times, they stop and they say they can’t think of one thing at all.  I tend to think the question in the first place is the relief.  To stop and wonder about something like that takes you out of the bustlings. 

Astonished Attention to Hearts

I stood at the counter in my kitchen this morning and made coffee and thought about hearts. 

About mine.  About people who I love. 

About the things of this world that so quickly go to conversations of the heart. 

Sometimes the most dynamic thoughts of the entire day come to me when I’m standing there in the quiet, early morning, in the few seconds when I anticipate the coffee.  When the coffee is poured, I am suddenly in the mood for writing.  A few short blinks later, and it is time to get ready for school.  And I’m ushered into the business of teaching, and any quiet thought while pouring the coffee comes back sparingly.  But the common trend is that the mornings always help my little heart. 

Yesterday at school I showed the students This Day in History online…it’s what we do for a birthday… and one of the stories talked about the first pacemaker that was put into a person.  He lived for 112 days with this first artificial heart.  And there it was, on the screen…they showed the chest cavity being opened and this machine being put inside.  Just for a second.  My students gasped.  I stared at it, and felt, once again, this profound gratitude that I’m not in charge of medical procedures.  And this amazement at the actual look of this process.  You hear about pacemakers.  You hear about recovery.  You do not hear about the moment when they lower the heart into the body. 

Hearts can mean so many different things.  It can mean a pacemaker, or the things in the margins on the homework I am grading, which is the common doodling practice of some of my middle school girls.  

It can mean Valentine’s Day, or how you reference the goodness of falling in love, or anxiety which makes it race in your chest.  Or, in contrast, the beating of your heart that tells you that the exercise has paid off and that you are strong.