{"id":3874,"date":"2009-04-23T14:07:08","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T19:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=3874"},"modified":"2009-04-23T14:07:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T19:07:08","slug":"exercise-for-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=3874","title":{"rendered":"Exercise for the heart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was speaking to a friend the other day about love and she was saying sometimes it just doesn&#8217;t seem worth the effort because it ends in heartbreak. I was thinking about our conversation as I went through the long last week of Arlene&#8217;s life and wondering why do people do this? Get a dog, put it to sleep. Heartbreak. <\/p>\n<p>A friend wrote today about his own thoughts of having a dog: &#8220;I just don&#8217;t think I can go through it again (getting another one and going through the heartbreak, I mean, even with all the joy). All that innocence, that unconditional love, those ecstatic responses, night after night, to the same damn food. . . It&#8217;s just too much.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I was assembling some notes about turning 50 and some physical goals to ward off the effects of aging, but there is no warding off heartbreak &#8211; it comes from places and at times you don&#8217;t expect. The only real way to not have your heart broken is to not use it and just think of how that would look? <\/p>\n<p>The heart after all is a muscle &#8211; it gets stronger with exercise. The metaphorical heart does too. You love not necessarily deeper each time, but you love wiser and you understand that love is a gift and is not to be taken for granted. It becomes more precious as you age, more ephemeral, more pure. <\/p>\n<p>I looked at the faces of Loca and Wolfie this morning &#8211; eagerness. They were awaiting my love, their breakfast (same damn food), and the start of a brand new day. <\/p>\n<p>If we could all begin that way each day &#8211; damn, life would be good. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was speaking to a friend the other day about love and she was saying sometimes it just doesn&#8217;t seem worth the effort because it ends in heartbreak. I was thinking about our conversation as I went through the long last week of Arlene&#8217;s life and wondering why do people do this? Get a dog, put it to sleep. Heartbreak. A friend wrote today about his own thoughts of having a dog: &#8220;I just don&#8217;t&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-10u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}