Following Your Heart
When simple advice isn’t straight-forward.
We all have that friend who is just as old as we are but usually comes off as wise beyond their years. So a few years ago, in the middle of a dilemma, I reached out to one of such friends.
I went on and on over the phone to them one afternoon, explaining the challenge before me. After exhausting all of the different ways I could paint a clear picture of the issue at hand, I paused, allowing myself to catch my breath as I waited in anticipation for their all-illuminating response.
When it did come, it was short, simple and nothing like I expected.
“What does your heart say? Follow your heart.” He said.
And it was meant to be that simple. Except it wasn’t.
“But what if I don’t know how?”. I responded.
And I was serious. How did one tell the difference between heart and head? They chuckled and I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. I went away very dissatisfied, to say the least, and feeling like the conversation wasn’t as useful as I had hoped.
If anything, rather than point me in the direction they thought was right (which was really what I wanted), they had ended up confusing me further. The result was this tweet below:
The heart is always speaking, it is our heads that are constantly getting in the way.
I love plans. I thoroughly enjoy the process of deconstructing things — problems, goals, ideas, systems, you name it. My analytical side gets a huge kick out of this and I allow it to indulge fully. A.K.A your quintessential Type-A.
Last year, however, I had a moment. I was planning rather meticulously for a particular event, but due to circumstances outside my control, the date for the event was brought forward. I was totally unprepared in every way and in the space of a weekend, I had to put together a plan that ideally should have taken weeks.
As fate would have it, the event was successful. It wasn’t without its challenges, and with support from friends and family everything turned out well. What I realized though was that those challenges were not ones that my planning could have prevented me from, because I couldn’t have anticipated them.
Since nothing major broke in my previous experience, my appetite for the unplanned grew. There were a number of key decisions I intended to make. I knew what I wanted, but hadn’t quite figured out the how and perhaps more importantly, the outcome. Armed with my recent experience I decided to give up planning and just decide to move in the direction I wanted. I would figure things out on the way. I knew what I didn’t want and that was enough.
More than a year later and multiple less-planned, successful journeys after, I think I finally cracked it. Not only have I done more things in the past 365+ days, that are more aligned with what I want to do, I’ve also delved into new things that caught my fancy.
The effect? More internal peace and satisfaction all as a result of my head and heart no longer being at war. Cracking this really was apparently easy — it simply meant being in tune with what I truly wanted.
In that time I have come to realize that the heart is always speaking, it is our head that is constantly getting in the way. The heart speaks with promptings and longings. It’s expressed in the quiet sighs, the flashes of hope — those things we really want to do, but just haven’t figured out how.
The head, on the other hand, speaks with statistics and figures, constantly pitting the odds against reality. The head is not the enemy. On the contrary, I believe that our heads can truly figure out anything; they’re truly magical. But to reach its full potential it has to be led by the heart. Committed to a goal, the head will figure out how to achieve anything set before it. It’s quite unstoppable! The major flaw of the heart, however, is in its quiet nature. It is therefore easy to drown out the heart’s desires by the loud reasoning of the head. Don’t.
How do you know you’re following your heart? It doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles but you can trust your head, the powerhouse of logic and reasoning, to figure a way out. What it does mean, however, if you’re like me, is you’ll notice you burst randomly into sing-alongs (I had no idea how frequently I did this until I started to pay attention), or break into a soft smile, just because. For the plain and simple reason that your heart is at peace.
When the chatter of the head ends, the heart is quiet when it is at peace. At the end of the day, as Steve Jobs already alluded, the heart already knows what it wants, and I’ll add all we need to do is not just listen but also have the courage to act.
So, even though the future will never quite be certain, a future led by the heart is a much surer bet to bring us to the fulfillment that we desire.
