Medical technology has come a long way in a very short time. In my lifetime, the science of cardiac care has progressed to the point that now, every day, surgeons routinely probe inside the beating heart, manipulate vital nerve connections, burn away unneeded tissue to make hearts more efficient, and even stop hearts in their pumping long enough to repair damage. There seems to be no mystery any longer with or about the human heart.
Except one. What makes it so inexplicably difficult to understand why our hearts are drawn to those we fall in love with? After all the years of study, the time in laboratories and classrooms, in operating rooms and using advanced procedures, why can we not assign even the simplest explanation to why we fall in love? Here's a key to the dilemma, and an insight that really does explain, from a layman's view, the inner working of the human heart: Hearts have no color, no creed, no race, ethnicity, gender orientation or nationality. The human heart is, with few exceptions, about the size of our fist, weighs two pounds, pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every day, and continues in this fashion for well over 70 years, on average. In that time the heart beats an astounding 2.5 billion times! Yes, billion.
So why does it beat faster when that certain person enters the room, or smiles at us, or falls into our arms? We don't know. Science is working on it. One thing we do know: There's no restriction on who we fall in love with. And something else--as Carson McCullers said, the heart is indeed a lonely hunter, so the answer to one question is immediately clear. We fall in love with the person we fall in love with. No one else can assign, determine, restrict or predict who that person might or ought to be for us. When someone comes along with the key to our heart, we know it. And something else even scientists and doctors know. It's not important who we love; it's important THAT we love.
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