Heartspotting

I often think of how it is a very desolate, awful world we have found ourselves inhabiting. With an ingrained cynicism of the skeptical 13-year-old in me who never really left, I find myself feeling rather hopeless about anything and everything all at once. This world feels a little too heavy and my shoulders feel just shy of strong enough to carry this burden. There is a strange sense of grief that seems to wash over me; an anticipatory grief. A grief that seems to arrive before the love it calls out to has even started its journey towards me. It feels as if the whole world might cave in on itself, and it is a terrifying feeling indeed.

It is then that I remember the existence of the heart.

The shape, that is.

There are hearts everywhere for those with eyes to see them. The leaf of the peepal tree that grows by my grandmother’s house. The Heart Book that somebody made in Denmark 500 years ago and filled with their favourite love ballads. A Victorian-era Valentine’s Day card with an illustration of two burning hearts. The grain of the wood that the doors of my wardrobe were made out of. There are hearts everywhere for those with eyes to see them—and when I remember the existence of this simple shape, I realise how much more beautiful this world might seem if I saw it from such a pair of eyes. 

So I’ve started a thing I like to call Heartspotting. Inspired by the website (which is a perfect place to visit if you’re ever looking for something to cheer you up after a gloomy day: www.heartspott.ing), for the last couple of months I’ve been documenting every little heart-shaped thing I see. And it is true. There truly are hearts everywhere for those with eyes to see them; and now that I’ve gained this lens to look at the world through, I’m hoping a reader might as well.

One particular Tuesday afternoon, while walking back from Spanish class with my classmate, I stopped us both dead in our tracks on the College Link to take a picture of this little blob under my feet that just looked so much like a heart. And I’ve been collecting them everywhere I can find them—which, it turns out, is a whole lot of places (although I doubt everyone wants to see that spot of perfectly heart-shaped yolk on my eggs that I only discovered when they were half-eaten and no longer very presentable).

Author’s Note: Our wonderful Phoenix Press Head Joelle has said she wants to see the eggs. So, dear readers, you shall all see the eggs as well:

I found this one while grocery shopping with my dad. It’s long been one of our rituals; with careful precision, he’ll teach me how to pick the right produce, which watermelons are watery and which ones are sweet (and I’d like to think I’ve gotten better than him at identifying them now). Though I suppose looking for potatoes shaped like hearts weren’t originally on that list, it’s become an addition to our bi-weekly grocery runs.

The next is from a friend’s lunch; it had been a particularly difficult week for the both of us, but I couldn’t help but notice that the way he’d poured ketchup onto his plate was shaped suspiciously like my favourite shape. 

This one, I discovered while cooking a mushroom curry for the very first time. I am by no means a good cook (I have burned nearly everything I have made thus far in all 19 years of my existence)—but this mushroom curry could qualify as half-decent; good, even, if one is being generous. So perhaps it was a sign from the universe that I shouldn’t give up on my culinary dreams just yet. 

Heartspotting has given me something to search for—a strange sense of purpose that guides me as I go about my day, determined to find every vaguely heart-shaped object I see and photograph it from multiple angles to put it up on that website, so that someone else might see what I do. On a good day, it’s another one of the mundane little joys that might make my eyes crinkle with some laughter. On a bad day, however, is when the hearts truly shine. This strange sense of purpose they’ve brought me flares up, and a single little pretty thing that looks like it might be worthy of being photographed seems to be the best balm to the exhaustion that weighs heavy and settles into my bones, or the longing that seems to pierce my heart like a wicked knife. 

And it is on those days that I go on my occasional “grass-touching walks.” It is on those days that I feel that everything is meaningless. It feels like a trick of the universe; but not quite cruel and nihilistic, in that the world is meaningless, and so am I. Rather, it is more of a forceful reminder that there is so much more to the world than my little problems. On those days, the world seems to preen about and fan out all its feathers to be on full display, to show just how varied and full of beauty and love and life it can be. Nothing matters, and therefore everything does. Nothing matters, and so I must go on in spite of this exhaustion that weighs me down. Nothing matters, and so I must go on for the things I love most.

And perhaps that is why we go on loving and caring for the things that we see. Perhaps that is why we seek comfort in the arms of our beloved, why we seek validation from someone we’ve put up on a pedestal of admiration. Perhaps that is why I sit here at my desk, typing away all these words that seem to have been pent up in my mind for years. Perhaps that is why I put up my hearts for the world to see. I want somebody to know what I have seen. I want someone to look at the world through these eyes of a heart-spotter. I want the world to know that I once existed, that I was a speck upon this big rock floating in space alongside other big rocks. All of humanity has so much in common—each one of us who has ever existed has seen the same moon, the same stars up in the sky, and has felt the warmth of the same sun. And perhaps each of us, in our pursuit of meaning in this increasingly nihilistic world, has attempted to tell the future a simple statement. I have felt the breeze on my neck and felt grass beneath my feet. I have lived a life. 

And isn’t that what all art is? A declaration to the world, proclaiming each of our individual and collective existences, and hoping that someday, someone from the future might look at what we’ve made and find a piece of themselves in this relic from the past. To quote one of my favourite films of all time (which also made me absolutely bawl my eyes out for the entirety of the final 30 minutes), “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. [...] Poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.”

There is something innately human about the creation of art, something that no machine could ever replicate no matter how intelligent it becomes. There will always be a difference between seeing an “artwork” made by punching prompts into a chatbot and viewing what it makes by meshing together numbers and lines of code and work from artists, and the feeling of pressing your palm on the walls of Cueva de Las Manos and viewing the handprint of a human that lived over 10,000 years ago underneath your own. There will always be a difference between the chimeric nature of a “song” made by an algorithm, and feeling like you are almost in another plane of existence as you listen to the artist you have loved since you were 11 perform your favourite song live. There is something innately human about the creation and the consumption of art, and this hunger to find ourselves in the world around is perhaps the very life-force behind our being. 

So if I could, perhaps, encourage you to do something on those days when life feels empty and hopeless and you find yourself longing for a reason to propel yourself into the next day, I might suggest that you seek solace in the simple heart. Find every little heart you see and take a picture of it so you might look back at it on another day. Go see the sky when the sun is setting and it turns into an ethereal combination of the most gorgeous hues of pinks and purples and oranges you might never come across ever again—for every sunset is different. Go up and look at the cosmos that every person who has ever existed has also seen, and try to find the shapes that they saw in the stars. Look up at the sky and try to find those other big little rocks and clouds of gas that share the emptiness of the universe with all of us. Go heartspotting, and you might find that the world is full of such little beautiful things—and you are as part of them as your arms and legs are part of you.

A piece of perfectly heart-shaped granola to conclude this little piece.