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looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and forwhat purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? Whatmeaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I forGod? All these questions lead us back to the heart.RETURNING TO THE HEART9. In this %u201cliquid%u201d world of ours, we need to start speaking once more about the heart and thinkingabout this place where every person, of every class and condition, creates a synthesis, where theyencounter the radical source of their strengths, convictions, passions and decisions. Yet, we findourselves immersed in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day, dominated by thehectic pace and bombarded by technology, lacking in the patience needed to engage in theprocesses that an interior life by its very nature requires. In contemporary society, people %u201crisklosing their centre, the centre of their very selves%u201d. [6] %u201cIndeed, the men and women of our timeoften find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can createunity and harmony in their lives and actions. Models of behaviour that, sadly, are now widespreadexaggerate our rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, that of our instincts%u201d. [7] Noroom is left for the heart.10. The issues raised by today%u2019s liquid society are much discussed, but this depreciation of thedeep core of our humanity %u2013 the heart %u2013 has a much longer history. We find it already present inHellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its variousguises. The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it aforeign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will or freedom. The very meaning of theterm is imprecise and hard to situate within our human experience. Perhaps this is due to thedifficulty of treating it as a %u201cclear and distinct idea%u201d, or because it entails the question of selfunderstanding, where the deepest part of us is also that which is least known. Even encounteringothers does not necessarily prove to be a way of encountering ourselves, inasmuch as our thoughtpatterns are dominated by an unhealthy individualism. Many people feel safer constructing theirsystems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will. The failure tomake room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation fromone another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, isthe one reality that can unify all the others.11. If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with theheart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we missthe messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of ourencounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past,since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.12. It must be said, then, that we have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to3