He had worked at UPS for 14 years by the time he needed the heart transplant. Not just words, these. I want you to stop and take a breath and think about this for a few minutes as you read. Think of your own heart and give it your thanks. Now consider what it might be like to have your chest sliced open, each rib cut through, and to be peeled open, to actually die as your heart is removed and a different heart, one that came from another person, placed inside you.
Think about that moment when, like a modern day Frankenstein’s monster, electricity jolts that heart to life, resurrecting you. Talking with a new rhythm to every single cell of your body. It’s alive!
When he recovered, Kevin didn’t want to go back to UPS. He had an urge to go to culinary school and so he made it happen. As I type these words, Kevin is being featured on Bobby Flay’s famous grilling chow on the food channel. Only two sentences were used to tell his story as he was introduced, but there is was. After the transplant, after the career change he found out that the donor heart he’s received was the heart of a chef.
Bobby and Kevin started grilling fish as if having one’s life reinvented by the desires in a dead man’s heart happens every day, and I came in here, tears stinging my eyes, marveling at the magnificent mysteries of life and death.
What wonders are right here in our daily lives and offhand experiences that we overlook...words that we've heard a thousand times that we never stop to consider the experience those words represent?
I hope that at least for today, after you read this post, you may be insopired to slow down, contemplate the mysteries before you...the falling leaves, glittering starts and the heart within each of us.
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This most definitely provided another encouragement to slow down and smell the fall scents of falling leaves and wet streets, to sense the electricity of storms, clouds, sun breaks and all the other things we miss when our nose is to the grindstone! Thanks!
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