
Your heart, the very essence of your being. The fact is that without a heartbeat your life, your perception of many things, is ultimately nothing. In Joyas Voladoras, Doyle proposes that each lifetime has a limit, and that one should live in the moment rather than let life fly past. The quote “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment,” (Doyle 96)  in the beginning of the second paragraph, and the beginning of the third paragraph are all accurate representations of how Doyle suggests to live in the moment. This article uses metaphors to contrast hummingbirds to the blue whale in hopes of creating a larger impact on the main concept. Although it is wise to not waste time away, Doyle advises to his readers that life is a privilege with a limited amount of time to spend however chosen.

Life itself is precious, and you have to decide how to live it before your time runs out. For example, when Doyle writes “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment,” (Doyle 96) it symbolizes the abundance of life to be lived. This symbolic phrase reminds the reader of how valuable life is. Doyle longs for the reader to understand that there should be times in life to sit back and reflect on the importance of living without regrets. One example of living for each moment would be the life of the hummingbird. 

Furthermore, the life of a hummingbird is full of adrenaline yet simultaneously short lived. As the second paragraph describes, the hummingbird visits a thousand flowers a day, can dive at sixty miles an hour, fly backwards, and even fly five-hundred miles without resting; however, every time they rest, they come close to death. At night or even when they are starving, they retreat into torpor while their metabolic rate slows to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, and their hearts are barely even beating at this point. In this paragraph, Doyle’s use of commas creates a slippery slope effect when talking about the hummingbird’s bodily reaction to rest. The hummingbird’s body negatively responds to rest because they were not made to rest, and Doyle’s use of commas gives the reader a downhill effect. Doyle proposes that there is a choice for humans to live their lives quickly like the hummingbirds, but in reality, these hummingbirds do not realize their lives are considered short. They live for each day, hour, and moment by doing their job for the ecosystem, which also happens to also be the only way they know how to survive. The goal of these tiny creatures is to open their eyes each morning to visit flowers, collect the nectar, and awake again the next morning. They don’t know when their last breath will be, and don’t worry about how to live their lives, they just do it. This is something Doyle minimally states throughout this passage by giving the reader so many examples of how simple yet complex the life of a hummingbird is. 

In the third paragraph, Doyle goes into more detail about the hummingbird’s body and lifestyle. He writes “Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye popping rate” (Doyle, 95). Using not only metaphors but also hyperboles to express how incredible the hummingbird really is, Doyle compares their bodies to that of a human in hopes of expressing why their lives are so much shorter. They only live for two years at the most because their bodies work much harder than a human, to keep up with their strenuous, fast-paced lifestyle. Doyle says “Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight” (Doyle, 95). This sentence is particularly important to the central concept because it illustrates to the reader that every moment of life counts for this tiny bird. In reality every moment of a human's’ life also counts, but people usually don’t consider the permanent impact everyday decisions have on a life span. 

In contrast to the hummingbird, the blue whale has the biggest heart in the entire world and Doyle expresses this when he writes “It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves” (Doyle, 95). This is the beginning of a very important description from Doyle’s article. The next few sentences use numbers to exaggerate just how big the blue whale is like when he writes “When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons” (Doyle, 95). This representation of large numbers ties in with the large mammal and its large lifetime. It expresses the value of numbers in the main concept of small numbers, small lifetime; large numbers, large lifetime. 

In conclusion, this article is a strong willed argument stating that life is worth living; taking every moment for what it’s worth because day it will be gone. Doyle suggests to his audience that the value of living a life without regret is a concept of utmost importance. His examples of the hummingbird’s life, and the whale’s heart, convey to the reader that life is composed of small moments, of which we must dwell in and absorb before our time is up. So, take a breath, and live life today; you never know when it could be your last. 
