We’re being told time and again how important it is to follow ones heart. I have said it time and again myself and I believe in it, with all my heart in fact.
But it becomes difficult when the heart wants things that the head doesn’t agree with, or needs convincing of. My head always interferes. I’m such a head person, even though my heart is leading all my actions. It seems like an odd conundrum.
I don’t know how everyone else feels about these things. Often you can only tell by paying attention to people’s actions. Are they doing the things they are doing from the heart or is it reason (or whatever they believe to be reason) making them do as they do?
Clearly many things we do every day, all week, year around, are based on needs must. We must have a day job to be able to eat and sleep in a dry place surrounded by the things we own (or in too many cases the things that own us). Yet my heart (and maybe yours) often finds this revolting.
That’s when conflict arises inside of me that gives me strange dreams (stranger than usual) and restless sleep. I revolt against my day job. Whilst I hope this will change in the future, for now I do this every single day. I couldn’t feel more trapped sitting in a cage. But had I a pen and a piece of paper in that cage, I might still retain some freedom, because my mind is hard to trap, as is my heart.
Why have we done this to ourselves? Trapped in these lives, these conventions of what they should look like and what we must do, all those artificial expectations. And this is what we call freedom?
Well, I hate to disappoint, but it’s not. True freedom would be to follow your heart at all cost. That is also truly selfish, I might add. The “at all cost” part in any case.
The best kind of freedom would be for all of us to follow our hearts unimpeded and without harming another. Maybe I should write a “Utopia” based on that premise and see where it leads me. It certainly wouldn’t be anything like Thomas More’s.
The thing is, having a heart unimpeded prevents it from holding other hearts inside of it. Love is an impediment. I’m saying this as rationally as I know how and I don’t mean it in a bad way. But love holds us prisoner. If it weren’t for the love I have for my family and my friends, I would not be here. I’d travel and write and live on next to nothing, because I don’t need much.
But I would never give that love up. It holds its own kind of freedom, and of course, so much joy and peace. It allows me to travel the globe and come back home knowing that I have been missed, just as much as I have missed them.
Love only impedes selfishness.
I don’t consider that a bad thing.
The heart will never stop wanting what it does. It’s unbelievably greedy. But not getting what it wants and not regretting or begrudging that, is part of its capacity of incredible selflessness.
I know what’s in my heart. I know the length and width and depth of it. It’s not a place of safety, but one of dreams and love and adventure and recklessness and abandonment.
Few people are allowed inside and fewer will be getting a piece of it. There will only ever be one other it will truly admit. That’s the hopeless (or hopeful, as I have been told) romantic speaking.
My heart is the most vulnerable thing, the most fragile part of me. It is also the strongest. Sometimes I think it protects me better than I protect it.
It is as if it is not mine to give. It will give and open itself when and to whom it wishes.
And it will stubbornly follow the path it chooses, regardless of what my head may have to say about the matter or person in question.
And this is my truth. You have yours and no obligation to believe mine.
2clouds 