In the end, the heart

I am an early riser, and on a normal day, after a cuppa and a half hour or so of freewheeling (feels like five minutes), I make coffee for two between breakfasting kids when my wife comes downstairs. She loves that first cup, and being a romantic sort (and a mediocre barista), I have taken to scribing a heart shape with the milk froth for her.

The other day, after the kids were out and I’d done a couple of hours work, I walked past the now empty coffee cup on the kitchen counter. To my surprise, the heart shape was still there on the leftover froth (that layer you’d need a teaspoon for to scoop out of the cup).

Insert heart-cliché here, but don’t we say, “his heart wasn’t in it”…“put your heart into it”…and so on?

Making coffee is a meditative act. It’s easy and satisfying to plonk that heart on the top—start well.

And then? Success, failure, gain, loss, external stress and internal turmoil? So much revolves around having things and striving to have them. And throughout, we submerge the heart, hide from it, or wear it on our sleeve. When the cup is drained and life is in the balance, what do you see in the dregs? It will be there. In the end, the heart.

“Have a good time, all the time”¹ probably won’t work as a philosophy but: do what you love, do it much and keep on doing it might. Be the one thing they can’t take away from you and end well.

I just got back from England, where we interred my dad’s ashes—a mere pile of dust returned to the earth whence it came. What did we remember in the ceremony? His bank balance? His vanquished foes?! No, it was him doing what he loved: playing ukulele and singing “Karma Chameleon”.
Life comes and goes. In the end, the heart.