The body cannot live without a heart. It takes up only a small amount of space in the body but is the most important organ. Brian Doyle writes “So much held in a heart in a lifetime” (Doyle 96), which expresses a major theme in his story “Joyas Voladores” that, it is incredibly easy to forget the importance of life and even though our heart is protected on the inside our heart is still very vulnerable. By using personal examples, Brian Doyle is able to compare the similarities between all living creatures, even the animals containing differences, such as the humming bird and the blue whale. Doyle’s usage of personification when describing the animals, creates an underlying meaning in his story that the heart is very fragile so take good care of it, you never know when it might stop beating. Each of the animals described in Doyle’s essay explains that despite differences between animals and humans, we all have a heart that can break.

The Hummingbird continuously fly’s never stopping or taking a moment to rest. The Hummingbird lives up until the age of two. It lives its life on a day to day basis flying fast all around while its heart beating ten times per second. There is always a negative effect when the body or heart is accustomed to beating daily that fast for so long. For instance, when the hummingbird lands on a branch and it is time for it to rest the longer the hummingbird sits there the closer the bird is to death. “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature” (Doyle 95). Doyle uses a hummingbird as a metaphor to portray that humans are trying to live their lives like hummingbirds, except if human’s choose to live life this way their heart will beat too fast therefore ending their life.

Unlike the hummingbird’s tiny heart, the biggest heart in the world belongs to a blue whale, which weighs more than seven tons. Its heart is as big as a room, that a child could walk around in. The baby blue whales thrive from the mother’s ability to nurture and produce food for it every day. Doyle writes “Blue whales drink hundreds of gallons of milk from its mother everyday” (Doyle 95), showing how important and dependent the baby whale is of his mother. Doyle also points out “There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and one of the largest animals who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs” (Doyle 95). The only answer to what Doyle stated is that having a family, or others that support you is the only way humans or any creatures in this world can survive. These animals show us how to love in life. By traveling, living in pairs, hunting together, fighting the enemy together, truly shows us the real example of love and the meaning of taking care of each other. Without the whales sticking together the result would be “penetrated moaning cries underwater for miles and miles” (Doyle 96). The whales are not just family to each other they are one big support system, alarm system, and a health system. People nowadays should not discriminate or have hatred for others because one day we will only have each other. 

Aside from the size differences of animals and humans we all have one thing in common, a heart. “We all churn inside” (Doyle 96). Doyle makes a huge statement in the story “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, or a moment” (Doyle 96). The idea Doyle wanted to make in that statement is that life is important, including every single second. Take time for yourself and try to make every moment you have special and better than the last. In this world we only live once and many people take it for granted and regret later in life what they could have accomplished. Doyle then goes in to detail how we as people utterly in the end are not open with anyone honestly or fully besides our own selves.  When Doyle stated, “We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart” (Doyle 96), means that we choose who we let into our lives but we are in control of our own lives. We all live with our hearts shielded sometimes and that is just part of life but we cannot continue to live in fear. As we age our hearts become “bruised and scarred, scorned and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force or character, yet fragile and rickety” (Doyle 96). When Doyle made that statement he was portraying to the fact that despite the hardships, heartbreak and loss we still have fragile hearts because we simply are human. Moreover, Doyle is trying to express that we as humans put up walls when it comes to love, trying not to get a broken heart or simply because we are just scared. Eventually we let people inside our walls, the outcome is either love or hurt. Despite the outcomes there is no way to prevent life from occurring.

In this story Brian Doyle is able to define the heart as the one unifying factors of all living organisms. Although a Hummingbird has a heart the size of a pencil eraser or the blue whale’s heart is the size of a room a child can fit in, we all have a heart that feels the same feeling of love, regret, pain, loss, and being deserted. The size of the heart does not matter, nor shape, or color. Doyle proves an important point that it is impossible to go through life without having any hardships or heartbreaks. Negative problems are inevitable and are going to happen in your life that you cannot escape. There will never be a “perfect” person we are all the same underneath our outer appearance. Thus, Doyle’s essay creates and explains a relationship between all walks of life that we all have a heart despite our differences. 