Harvey described the heart as a pump. This was a mechanistic view which indicated that if the heart ‘broke down’, it had to be repaired like a machine. It did not take into account that the heart is a living organism sensitive to feelings and can recreate itself. As Deepak Chopra writes, ‘The body is a river,’ a swiftly changing river, which can reinvent itself by replacing unhealthy tissues with tender new tissues at the cellular level?
Our understanding of human life and growth is becoming organic. Building a life is not like putting up a building, but more like growing a tree: slower, organic and evolutionary. It cannot be done in a hurry. Like Nature, human development in order to be healthy has to follow a slower, more stable timetable. Those who seek to speed it up beyond a point will have to pay the price. The price may be their own lives. Many have died to live up to some unrealistic modern myth of yuppydom and success.
Excerpts from ‘The Happiness Quotient’