Following my Heart

Over the years that I have been writing this little blog, my posts have at times been influenced by things I read on other blogs. Perhaps a title, or a quote, or a photograph, or sometimes just a sentence or two speaks to me and takes my mind down paths it might otherwise not have gone.  In fact, the title of my blog was inspired by a quote I kept reading various places at the time I was starting to write here. If a post I have written only came to be because of something I’ve read or seen somewhere else, I have always prefaced what I write with the inspiration behind it.

This morning, I was once again motivated to write based on something I read on a blog I have only recently started following. The author of the blog, Sarah, is someone I actually met many years ago when I first began attending national perinatal bereavement conferences with my coworkers. However, in the past year I have gotten to know her better since becoming part of the board of a professional organization that she is the past president of.  I have also gotten to know her in a different way through the stories she shares on her blog, and I so admire and enjoy her writing and the very eloquent way she shares her life and thoughts. Her blog, Small Points of Light, has not only become one of my favorite to read, but it has become one I check several times a week, hoping for a new post. One of the things I most appreciate about her blog is that she frequently has a similar thought process to mine, as in very routine things about her day can trigger thoughts and reflections that are much deeper than the event that prompted them. I love that, because my thought processes occasionally go the same way. Although, I do have to say that as a writer, she is definitely more “polished” than I am, and whereas I sometimes have a difficult time neatly wrapping it all up at the end in a way that makes some kind of sense and order from all of my rambling thoughts, she does so quite beautifully.

So, back to this morning when I read her latest post called, “Magnetism.” She started off by telling a story about how once long ago, she was leaving a conference on a Sunday and rather than head the direction she needed to be going to get home, she turned the complete opposite direction, even though she knew she should go home. She then wrote:

 Given a choice between what is logical and what draws my heart, though, my heart generally wins.

All I could think was, “Wow, that is SO me.” Not that I have ever thought of myself using those same words, but what my heart wants and is drawn to generally does win out over logic most of the time. Like this morning when I began writing this…logic was quite forcefully telling me that I ought to be doing a number of things on a beautiful Sunday morning, not sitting in pajamas when it was almost noon typing away at my computer while the dog sleeps  at my feet in the band of sunshine warming him (and my cold feet!) underneath my desk.

Logically, I should be:

a). finishing the daunting task of cleaning and organizing my pantry. I started doing that on Friday afternoon, and despite working on it in short bursts of time over the past three days, I am still not finished with it. Worse yet, because of that project, my kitchen is in disarray, and I need to get it all back in order before the work week begins tomorrow.

b). baking the banana nut muffins that I made the batter for, that is now chillin’ in the fridge because I decided to do some blog reading while I waited for the first batch to bake.

c). putting away the 5 baskets of laundry that I managed to wash and fold yesterday, but are still sitting here next to me.

d). cleaning up the mess I left in my kitchen after making banana nut muffin batter and preparing a roast to put in the crock pot for tonight’s dinner. Between all that and the mess from my pantry cleaning…well, trust me when I say that my kitchen is a DISASTER. 

e). getting dressed and ready to go do the week’s grocery shopping.

I’m sure I could think of more things, but those are the most important tasks I SHOULD be trying to accomplish right this moment. Obviously, my heart “won” in its desire to sit and write rather than do those necessary chores. They will just have to wait.

The ironic thing about reading that particular post from Sarah on this day is that I have been thinking a great deal lately about times that I have done something completely against what logically I thought I should be doing. I think that topic has been on my mind a lot recently because this month is the 10 year anniversary of when I started working at Share. When I was offered my job, it was totally unexpected. I had happily been a stay-at-home mom for nearly 13 years and volunteering at Share for almost two years. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted a job, and on a whim, after thinking about it for several days and being prepared to say no, I took it. I was terrified. I didn’t think I was cut out to be a working mom. I worried about how drastically my life would change, maybe not for the better…but I took it for the sole reason that I had grown to love the organization. That decision that I made with my heart instead of my head turned out to be an excellent one, one that led me to a very rewarding job that I can’t imagine not having, personal growth in ways I never could have imagined either, truly remarkable people, and best of all, a very dear friend who I can’t fathom not having in my life. I have accomplished things in the past 10 years that had never even been a blip on my radar.

After reading Sarah’s post this morning I have been unable to get that sentence above out of my head. I have learned that if I can’t get something out of my head, that is my signal that I need to put whatever is happening at the time on hold if at all possible and let whatever it is flow through my mind to my computer via my fingers and keyboard.

This morning, my flowing thoughts led to pondering other times when what drew my heart won out over what my brain said was the logical, maybe even “safe” thing to do. One big one happened when I was in college. At the end of my freshman year, at a family reunion, my aunt and uncle who lived in Colorado asked me if the following summer, after I had finished my associate’s degree at the local community college in Olney, if I would be interested in living with them and being a nanny to their three young sons so that my aunt could go with my uncle when he traveled for business. Without hesitation, I immediately said, “YES!!” I loved Colorado, and I had dreamed of attending Colorado State in Fort Collins, where they lived. However, I was paying my own way through college, and out-of-state-tuition was far beyond my reach. By living with them, I would be considered a Colorado resident after a year and would be able to attend CSU.

We made many plans that weekend, and the countdown to June 1983, when I would move to Colorado, was on! I talked to my aunt on the phone often, and through the winter, I excitedly thought about the adventure it would be. They owned a condo at Copper Mountain, and I looked forward to weekends spent there learning how to ski. They lived in a large, beautiful home nestled in the foothills of the Rockies; the mountains were a sight to behold from their kitchen window. Moving to Colorado was all I thought and talked about. Then, for some reason that I have still not ever been able to understand or figure out, in March of that year, I suddenly changed my mind, and everyone, most of all my uncle and aunt, were shocked. I quickly filled out an application for Eastern Illinois University, where several of my friends would be going in the fall. I found an apartment and moved to Charleston, IL in late August. I did second guess myself from time to time and wonder if I was making a huge mistake, but I quickly settled into campus life, made friends, became a little sister to a fraternity, changed my major from journalism to psychology and met my future husband at the end of my first year at EIU. It seemed I had my “answer” as to why fate stepped in and caused me to follow my heart at a time when everyone thought it was the dumbest thing I ever did.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I once again followed my heart rather than doing the “smart” thing. Tony and I were married in June 1986, six months after I had graduated from college with a bachelor in psychology and minor in sociology. Tony was still in school, due to graduate in August, and he had a job at the local radio station. I had been accepted into a graduate program and was working full time until classes started in the fall. We were married, we had a nice, furnished apartment near campus; our immediate future seemed to be settled and coming together nicely. Life was good, and one day, Tony came home and said to me, “What would you think about moving to Omaha after I graduate?” My first reaction was, “Why the hell would I want to move to OMAHA??” I knew his sister, brother and their spouses and children lived near there in Council Bluffs, IA, but that was all I knew about Omaha. I couldn’t imagine living there, but he was so excited about it that I gave in. I told myself, and everyone else told me too, how ridiculous our plan was. We didn’t have jobs lined up, we had nowhere to live yet--we literally left  Charleston with all of our worldly possessions in a 1982 blue Chevette. If you don’t know what a Chevette looks like, Google it. It is comparable today to a…well, I can’t even think of a car it’s comparable to. Bigger than a smart car, but smaller than a Ford Focus. We arrived at his sister’s house just after dawn the next morning. I spent most of the all-night drive through Illinois and Iowa wondering what the hell was wrong with me, why did I keep making decisions that defied all sense of what is “smart?” How could I have agreed to leave a safe, secure future for something so unknown? What if we couldn’t find jobs? What if we ended up back home within a short time, hearing everyone say, “I told you that was a dumb thing to do!?”

In the end, everything worked out. Within two weeks, we both had jobs, and within a month, we found a fabulous apartment, started buying furniture, began making friends, and settled into a life that again, I had never imagined for myself.

While those are two huge, life-altering examples of times I have followed my heart instead of my head, there are many smaller, more insignificant times, where my decision seemed to be a rash, not-very-well-thought-out one.

Like the time Tony and I decided on a snowy Saturday morning in March 1999 to take a trip to Florida, and by 5 PM two days later, we had packed the kids (who were 7, 4, 3 and 9 months) into our minivan and drove all night and most of the next day to Sarasota without even so much as a hotel reservation. What a grand adventure THAT turned out to be…I think that trip is what instilled a love for the beach in our children, and in me. We also discovered our very favorite vacation spot and hotel, one we returned to several years in a row. Our kids still talk about the Helmsley Sandcastle and want to go back there some day.

Or the time when my heart drew me to sit down at my computer one winter night and book a flight to visit my very dear friend, who I had spent the previous three years getting to know through hours of instant messaging and talking on the phone, but who I had never met in person. I will not ever forget the night I booked that flight, sent her the confirmation email, then spent the next 3 ½ months teeter-tottering back and forth between feelings of excitement and feelings of, “Oh shit, what have I done?” After spending a few minutes trying not to hyperventilate in the airport bathroom when the day finally arrived and I flew out to meet her, I spent a wonderful weekend getting to know a family who has become as dear to me as my own.

Or the time this summer when on a whim, I loaded up my girls and took a road trip to Minneapolis to go shopping at Mall of America. Again, so many people thought I was crazy, most especially my husband, but we spent a fun-filled five days driving, stopping when we wanted to stop, shopping, talking, eating whatever we felt like eating. I can’t wait to do it again, although I suspect it won’t have quite the same feeling of adventure as that first, so spontaneous trip when the girls didn’t even know where we were going until we got there.

There are many more “ors.”

Countless times throughout my life, I have been criticized for making snap decisions, and I have been told that I need to think things through more carefully. Mostly, I have agreed and wished I wasn’t so flighty at times. However, since reading Sarah’s post this morning, I have a new understanding for this very important part of the person I am. I realize that while it may seem as if I don’t think things through properly, indeed I do…and at the times when my heart and head are at odds, I usually go with my heart. For the most part, it hasn’t led me astray; I realize that when  I do follow my heart, things mostly work out. I’d even go so far as to say that there have also been times when I did follow my head instead of my heart, and things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to at all.

Near the end of her post, Sarah recalls the day when she followed her heart and went on an unknown adventure rather than doing what most people would do and head home after a long weekend of working:  She writes how she was drawn to  places of meaning in her life, and that each time something like that happens, it draws her closer to understanding why she is drawn to certain places at certain times.

As I try to wrap this up and tie together loose ends, which is what I always struggle to do no matter what I am writing, Sarah’s words are etched onto my brain. While at the time I may sometimes have seemed to be doing completely ridiculous things, I do eventually “get” why I was drawn to those things.  My decision to not move to Colorado all those years ago led me to my husband and the family I now have. My decision 10 years ago to take on a job that I wasn’t sure I wanted and was quite sure I wasn’t qualified for has enriched my life through people and experiences in ways that have profoundly changed me. Even the seemingly less important times that I have followed my heart have made me who I am and inspired me to be even more inclined to let my heart guide me. Even though I have “wasted” entirely too much time today writing this, I’m glad I read Sarah’s post this morning. During many times throughout my life, I have wished I could think more logically and use the sense God gave me in a better way. But, maybe I have been. Maybe the sense that God gave me is the sense to go with my heart when my heart and brain are at odds.