Life’s Heartbeat

Last week, I was having a very productive day around the house; doing laundry, cleaning my room, and all the things. As I was running all over the house, my roommate and a friend (who were both chatting on the couch) stopped me as I was walking back upstairs and asked – “what does life mean to you?” Whoa. That was not the question I was expecting as I was halfway up the stairs with laundry in my hands. My first instinct was to panic and say that it was too big of a question for a time like that and keep cleaning, but instead I paused. 

As I stood there pondering that question, still on the stairs, the first thing that came to mind was bringing it back to the basics. A heartbeat. Although I am not the most educated in the medical field, I do know that if we have a heartbeat, then we are alive (thanks Grey’s Anatomy, House, and all the medical shows I have watched). I know that there is so many intricacies and meanings to each part of a heart beat, but I would like us to simply just take a look at the shape of it.

In the image above, it shows high points and low points. And although I don’t have extensive knowledge about the heart, I know that to stay alive, I want my heartbeat to continue following the pattern above (or something similar). So if I compare living my life to this heartbeat, there are ups and downs as well. There are high peaks where I feel on top of the world, and times where I feel as though I’m in the pit and life is just really challenging.

If I look back at this last year, I have had some of my lowest lows and some of my highest highs. This year has been a year of grief and celebration, confusion and peace, sadness and joy. Life is both/and – those words make up the heartbeat of my life in these last seasons. It definitely has not been easy, but I am learning to thank the Lord for the joyful seasons, but also the seasons of grief. In life, the mountain peaks and the desert seasons go hand in hand. From my experience, I believe that the hard seasons carve room for us to experience more room for joy and hope that will come when we persevere and actually push deeper into the challenging things. The cool thing is that the Lord meets us on the mountaintops, in the pits, and in the land between. 

It can feel a lot easier and more comfortable to become numb to and avoid those tougher places. But if we are becoming numb to the hard things then we also don’t get the fullness of the mountaintops. We all have different ways to cope with the things that life throws at us, but it’s when we start just coasting through life, numb to the everything around us, that life starts to flat line – and in reality that’s not living. I used to think that life was only going well when I was experiencing the peaks of the heartbeat : thriving, excelling, happy, meeting goals, etc., but actually it seems as though I feel even more fully alive when I have the highs, lows, and everything in between. I know that I wouldn’t experience the breathtaking views of those mountaintops to the fullest if I didn’t experience the things I learned and tripped over on the way up. I’m realizing that many of the celebrations that we get to experience on the peaks are built upon the things we have overcome in the pits.

An example from my life currently is with my fitness journey. Weight loss is a tricky thing because even when you hit your goal weight, it doesn’t just magically stay at that number and you have to work to maintain it. Similarly to the heartbeat, with different seasons in my life comes ups and downs with weight loss. Because of some different circumstances, I have gained a little bit of the weight back. The joys and celebrations that came from fighting for my health and hitting so many milestones with running, quickly started melting away as insecurities and fears came flooding back in. Although it’s hard to fight through sometimes as I have slowed down a bit, I have had to learn to change my mindset. I have had days that I’m angry and upset that I’m not able to train for another half marathon, but I thank the Lord that I have the ability to walk! And although I could honestly say that I felt more confident and beautiful as weight was coming off and I was meeting goals, but in this challenging lesson currently, it’s my goal (and I’m determined) to see AND believe my beauty throughout all the ups and downs of this fitness journey.

I’m still working on how to apply this in my own life, but instead of only waiting to live for the peaks in our lives, how can we embrace both the ups and downs in life’s heartbeat?

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 “How rare and beautiful it is to even exist.” (Sleeping At Last)