ahka | Existential shock exercise. Read it at your own risk or benefit!

Stop for a moment.

Put your hand on your heart. (I am not kidding. Do it. Now!)

Feel your heart beating. Feel it pumping through your chest. Duh-dum. Duh-dum. Duh-dum. About once every second, 60 times every minute, 360 times every hour it beats without your awareness. Feel it beating right now, pumping away as if you don’t have a care in the world.

Your heart is a muscle, squeezing blood in and out, circulating it throughout your body and brain. It is also a muscle that is wearing out. Each of us is allocated only a certain number of heartbeats before the heart just stops beating altogether.

Now think about all the heartbeats that you waste every minute, every hour, every day. Think about all theheartbeats you give away when you’re bored and wile away time as if you have all the heartbeats in the world. But you don’t. Maybe a hundred left. Or a thousand. Or even a million. But the number left is finite.

So the question remains: What do you intend to do with the precious few heartbeats you have left?

If you actually followed this process, if you really paid attention to its implications, your heart is probably beating a little quicker right now. Thinking about death and our eventual demise is terrifying. Yet according to the existentialist, it is actually death that saves us, that motivates us to live life more intensely and passionately. If every heartbeat is a gift, if at any moment your heart could stop beating or a piano could fall on your head, what choices are you making to become more intensely involved in living and to accept responsibility for your decisions?

If that doesn’t get your attention, you weren’t listening.

From Kottler, J.A. & Brown, R.W. (2000) Introduction to Therapeutic Counseling: Voices from the field. 4^th ed. Wadsworth. (p.120).