One Heart

Be still our beating hearts

Whose side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you like the right things or the wrong things? Have you checked? Did you look it up? Are you sure?

Quick! Pick a team! Didn’t you know we’re at war? We can’t even agree on the facts anymore. All day every day is a struggle: who’s wrong? Who’s right? Whose fault is it? Who gets to be the judge?

Except it’s not like that really.

This is a Public Service Announcement: we’re all on the same team. Some of us are very badly behaved. Some of us are unforgivably awful. Thing is, though, we were all babies once, our tiny minds being blown by light and movement. A blank slate, all of it ahead of us.

Did you hear about the study of heartbeats recently? It was done by researchers at University College London who studied the heartbeats of audience members throughout a theatre performance. Get this: their heartbeats synchronised. They were entirely at the mercy of the theatrics unfolding before them (the theatre production, I looked it up, was the West End production of Dreamgirls). This heartbeat synchronising business happens, apparently, on two other occasions: when two people are in a romantic relationship, and when they’re effective team-members. How’s that! We don’t even have a choice! Humans are social animals, even when we’re not.

Bare feet in grass is the same: we’re biologically programmed to benefit from it. It’s science, but also, you have to admit, it’s kind of poetry too.

If you stand on a beach and bend down and slap your hands against your thighs, a dog will run towards you. Doesn’t matter who you are.

Music is a gift to your feelings from the universe. You share that gift, but also it’s yours.

The feeling of getting into fresh, cold bedsheets, on a fresh, cold night in a house that isn’t yours and snuggling into a bed that is both a familiar experience and an entirely new one probably happens to Kings and presidents and astronauts and circus clowns and mathematicians and you.

If you’re a human person in the world and there is an open fire near you, and you don’t stare at it absently and find it strangely wiping your mind clear of clutter, then perhaps you aren’t human at all.

Things look nice all in a row don’t they?

We all do that thing where, when the music stops in the middle of the song, your brain keeps it going for you whether you want it to or not.

Crossing the road, even if the pedestrian lights are green, most pedestrians have, at some stage in our lives, performed an apologetic little trot across the road to make the driver waiting for us think they’re waiting longer, which they aren’t. Or we’ve mimed “did you want a drink?” across a crowded room. Little theatrical performances for the benefit of others in everyday life.

A hot thing with a cold thing is pretty special. Ice cream with rhubarb pie. An iced drink with a spicy soup. Now I’m just hungry.

Try and dive into cold water and not come up doing some combination of gasping, squealing and grinning. Impossible.

Holding hands is nice. People in all cultures hold hands. It’s totally counterintuitive, though, isn’t it, biologically. Holding hands is a medical disaster. We laugh in the face of medical disaster and we hold the hands of the people we love because we love them, and because it makes them feel nice, to have a hand slip into theirs across the gap that separates them from everybody else.  

Everybody looks twelve when they’re drinking out of a straw or eating an icy pole. It’s just true. You can’t look mature or sophisticated when you do that, and nor should you.

If there’s music coming from inside a building and the lights glow orange and you’re outside and you have no idea what this event is, most of us kind of want to be invited. Standing at the door of a place with loud music though, where you can see the faces of the people inside, and there’s a chance you might know someone and a chance you won’t know anybody, most of us want to turn around and go home.

See?

 We aren’t that different. We’re all on the same team. Reach out over the gap and hold somebody’s hand. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

This was originally published in The Big Issue.