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What ‘by heart’ really means…

By Kapil Muzumdar in Daily Musings
Updated 20:22 IST Aug 01, 2019

Views » 754 | 2 min read

We all have memories of our childhood, largely vivid, but I’ll tell you one memory, which will directly, sort of, work on not your brain but your heart. When our teachers taught us, let’s say a poem, they would say, “by heart this and come tomorrow”. It always used to be ‘by heart’. And we used to go home and read it ten times over. Take that poem in our hand from this corner to that, we used to sort of repeat the lines and reciting the lines and transport all the content on the page to our brain. The next day morning we used to reach school and would speak a good 8 out of 10 lines perfectly. That for us was ‘by heart’. Did we ever give it a thought of why was it called ‘by heart’? That next morning when we stood there and recited the entire poem where we got 8 out of 10 lines correctly, was it really ‘by heart’? The fact is it was ‘by mind’. We minded it. And from that day onwards till the current day, we’ve been accustomed to only minding things. We’ve never really thought what do you mean by ‘by heart’? - Obviously, it meant connecting with our heart. ‘By heart’ is making it reach or feel your heart. By heart, it meant absorbing the essence. It meant not gathering the information but living its intent. It wasn’t important that you recited 8 out of 10 lines but it was important that you understood the spirit of that poem.

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