Follow Your Heart

The Daily Calm got me to thinking when the instructor mentioned this quotation from the author of Karma - Happiness in Your Life, Doe Zantamata:

“Decisions. We can think about things, turn them over in our minds a million times, play out possible scenarios, but really when it comes down to it, you have to go with your heart and move forward. Maybe things will go well. Maybe they'll turn out poorly. Every decision brings with it some good, some bad, some lessons, and some luck. The only thing that's for sure is that indecision steals many years from many people who wind up wishing they'd just had the courage to leap.”

There are times in life when you have to decide whether to follow your head or your heart. I have experienced three of them: my decision to go to MIT, my decision to move to San Francisco the first time, and my decision to move back to San Francisco. In all three cases, my head clearly knew the best decision was to go to CalTech (it would have been free), to stay in Hartford, to stay in Portland.

Despite living in my head most of my life, I could still hear my heart, and in all three cases my heart was clear. How I heard it, I’ll never know. Nor have I ever regretted following my heart.

While we’re on the subject of love (sort of), I’ve never said, “You belong to me,” nor “I belong to you.” I simply wasn’t taught to think that way, nor did my parents set that example.

I may have once said, “You complete me,” but I have since come to understand that in a healthy relationship, “you complement me.”