Lub Dub Quotes

I place my stethoscope onto their chest to listen for the lub-dub sound of the heart valves. Then I wait. I wait a long, silent, slow five minutes. I listen for silence and feel for the presence of absence. No sound is heard and no pulse is felt.

Tears spring to my eyes, and I bury my face deeper into his chest. This heavy grief wraps us together. “How, Fare? How do we do this?” He pulls back, thumbs wiping away my tears. His own face is wet. “One heartbeat at a time.” I squeeze my eyes shut. One heartbeat at a time. Lub-dub. My love for Kel, held forever at a distance. Lub-dub. My love for Ezryn, echoing off his impenetrable shell. Lub-dub. My love for Dayton, now an evil thing, something to be spurned and buried and forgotten. Lub-dub. My whatever this painful and consuming feeling for Caspian is. Lub-dub. I open my eyes and stare at Farron. My best friend, my first true love. The first man to make me feel like I was someone worth loving.

Gratitude lives between the lines of our individual and collective stories. It is not a trophy of good fortune but rather an essential metronome of the heart’s Lub Dub. By cultivating gratitude, we ensure strength of heart for the human experience.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.