Every Beat is a Gift
There is a voice in the body that does not use words. It is a voice that is steady, tireless, and largely unnoticed—until it falters. And if it stops, we stop too. We live from one beat to the next and between those beats lies the quiet possibility of death. None of us knows the hour when the rhythm will cease.
As a cardiologist, this rhythm is my profession. Sixty to eighty times a minute, the heart marks life’s passage. Over a lifetime it will contract nearly three billion times, beginning its work before the brain is formed, even before the first breath. It is both a pump and a miracle—capable of circulating enough blood in a week to fill a swimming pool but fragile enough to be silenced by a single clot.
Across cultures, the heart has always been more than muscle. It has been imagined as the seat of courage, fear, longing, and faith. Science, with all its scans and gadgets may dissect it to its smallest fibers, but mystery remains. Chest pain carries a weight no other symptom does. A headache may threaten a stroke, but it does not shake us like the faintest pressure in the chest. Perhaps, deep inside, all of us know the heart is our final fortress.
Modern medicine, in its precision, sometimes reduces the heart to a machine. Anyone who has stood at a bedside knows that emotions leave fingerprints on its rhythm. Grief can fracture it and a condition can arise called “ takotsubo cardiomyopathy”—broken-heart syndrome—when shock or sorrow floods the circulation with stress hormones and stuns the heart into stillness. In those moments,science and sorrow speak the same language.
Diet tells another story of betrayal. Rough breads and seasonal fruits have been replaced by packaged sweetness and refined grains. In this age of plenty, hunger is rare but so is health. Obesity and diabetes march beside us, carried not by famine but by excess. Ibn Sina once advised moderation—little food, little sleep, little talk that we forgot but our arteries remember the ordained paths .
The heart does not live on nutrition alone. It longs for tenderness. Love and laughter release oxytocin (the so-called Love- Hormone ) and endorphins that soften vessels and calm the pulse. To hold a beloved’s hand, to laugh until the eyes water—these are not sentimental luxuries but biological medicines. I have seen, in the sterility of wards, how a moment of laughter lightens the heaviness of illness more than any pill could. The heart thrives as much on joy as it does on blood flow and oxygen.
Modern life conspires against stillness. Screens glow, alarms buzz and minds scatter. Rarely do we pause enough to notice the silence between beats. Healthy hearts, paradoxically, are not perfectly regular; they dance with subtle variation, guided by the nervous system’s delicate balance. We call it “heart rate variability”, and it is a marker of resilience and natural dance of life .Meditation, even slow breathing, restores this balance as much as stillness heals.
The irony of our century is that the very progress designed to save us often imperils us. Sedentary jobs, endless commutes, diets heavy with convenience—these create slow, invisible wounds in arteries. Cardiovascular disease now claims more lives than any other cause, more than wars and pandemics combined. And unlike crises that dominate headlines, heart disease grows quietly, almost politely, until the day it does not.
World Heart Day is not simply another date on the calendar. It is a reminder to honor this organ that labors without pause, that carries our griefs and joys, that began before our first cry and will end with our last. To live heartfully is not only to preserve its muscle but to protect its mystery—because in the end, the heart is not only what keeps us alive, it is what makes us human.
The challenge is not only medical but moral. It requires restraint—eating what nourishes rather than what merely pleases. It requires attention—pausing long enough to let joy register as medicine. And it requires presence—choosing to live inside our bodies rather than inside the anxious projections of our screens.
World Heart Day 2025 is not about statistics or medical advances alone; it is a moment to listen to the quiet drum within us. The heart is not a machine but a lantern—it carries light through the corridors of our bodies, even when we are unaware. To care for it is to keep that lantern burning, not just for ourselves but for those who walk beside us.
Every beat is a gift, a knock at the door of life. To honor World Heart Day is to pause long enough to hear it, to recognize that we are all living in borrowed rhythm. And perhaps the truest celebration is simple: “to live more gently, to love more freely, to remember that the world itself has a heart, and it beats within each of us”.
And Rumi reminds us, “The heart is the sea; everything else is just waves”.I believe we should guard the sea, and the waves will carry us, and if we neglect it, even the tide forgets to return.
Dr Showkat Hussain Shah is Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, GMC Anantnag
