There’s a lot to be said for following your heart. For knowing its each and every nuance. For riding out the skipped beats, leaning into an impending corner; for letting the rhythm become deafening, even when it’s more cacophony than harmony; for bathing it in warm sunlight, removing the splinters with equal parts love and determination, swaddling it in fleeced cotton; for watering the garden and being open to both weeds and roses. For regarding the lines as cracks, and not faultlines. For gliding with the wind rather than bracing against it.
There is, however, more to be said for not following your heart. For ignoring it, for building a defence and creating a case and finding loopholes. For arguing against this tortured heart that bleeds and beats and burns in blackened bursts; for relegating it to the backseat, silencing it, slipping it a discarded pacifier. For dismissing its express wishes as little more than romantic virtue.
The mind hungers for logic. It will seek reason, will run you ragged, deplete you far beyond the reaches of exhaustion. It will find ways and means, justifications and excuses, analyses and contingencies. Launching plans of attack and assault on what is ultimately your own person, assailing your last remaining vestiges of happiness. It is a labour in vain, the mind’s furtive attempt to restore harmony by renouncing the heart.
Even when we can never truly know the heart of another, we can know our own. Know its depths. Its yearnings. Its restlessness. Its torment. Its true motivations. The same cannot be said for the mind, which, in times of turmoil, is oft known to resort to trickery and deceit.
To accept the emotion of the heart is to know the deepest self-love imaginable, one that the mind could never comprehend. Feel first. The greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.
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