Obligation Nation

Here we sit in the wake of Valentine’s Day, a.k.a. the celebration of the heart. Funny how no such celebration is required for the mind. I’m guessing it’s because we seem to be celebrating that one every day in our hyper-rational world of formal education, credentials, IQ’s, SAT scores, etc.  But one day is all we give the most useful navigational tool that we have for guiding us toward our right lives? Hardly seems right that a single silly 24-hour period of candy, flowers and greeting cards could adequately honor this incredibly under-understood organ, which ironically seems to be at the root of most all human triumph.

I recently had a reader who posed the question, “How do you know when what our heart tells us, lines up with what our mind says?” Well, I got to thinking, sorry, feeling that we just might have the hierarchy all wrong. Since the heart doesn’t speak in our native tongue, it doesn’t figure that it can lie to, or manipulate us like the mind can. On that alone it might become clear which is the more reliable source of counsel. Leadership expert Robin Sharma offers that “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,” yet we’re obligated to flip this truth in the name of protecting ourselves from the foolishness of our hearts.

So, alignment of the two might be less important than the balance of power that we afford them through choice. If your heart aches to paint, listen and then use your mind to find the art store. If your heart aches to play the tuba, listen and use your mind to take lessons. The heart still knows what you’ve perhaps forgotten. Sure we’ve blamed it for things like gambling losses and disastrous romances, but if you look back at all the things you told yourself about these ill-fated decisions, you just might see that behind it all were stories fabricated by our minds. Follow your much vaunted brain and you’ll, at very best, end up with many many masters, i.e. everyone who’s ever filled your head with erroneous information. But follow your heart and your life, at the very least, will be your own.

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