We often hear: “Follow your heart!” or “Listen to your heart!” and “This is the clue to a happy life.”
But how does one’s heart sound? How do I recognize that I follow my heart?
Yesterday I discovered a quote that gave me a clue:
“Welch eine himmlische Empfindung ist es, seinem Herzen zu folgen.“
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Interpretation:
„What a heavenly feeling to follow one‘s own heart.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
So this is how it is! Following my heart is not the condition for me to be happy. It is rather vice versa: when I feel happy, satisfied, blissful, when I am in the moment and enjoy my life, then I truly follow my heart.
This seemingly minor change, just change of sequence within a sentence, brings another interesting perspective. If the well-being is the indicator for following one’s heart, then it becomes clear that following one’s heart is not the same as following one’s dream. We often mistakenly attribute following one’s dream to following one’s heart. Dream is something in the future we hope to achieve. And we do have many happy moments before we achieve this far away dream.
Just a few days ago, I felt tired and considered all I did during that day as something that I thought I didn’t want to do. As a result a thought kept coming: “I am not following my dream. I did nothing for my dream today!” The dream being to be a published novelist. But the fact is that these thoughts were not true. I did do something for this dream that day, by editing some of the chapters of my novel. And I did also many other things, including for a dream that already came true: having a family.
It is quite funny how easy we can forget the dreams, which already came true. They fall out of our focus line. But weren’t they supposed to make us happy in the first place? Why do they fail doing so?
Or was it just my inability in that moment to look around and see the beauty of what is already there that made me unhappy? Oh, now I SEE! This is where my heart is! It is right here, right now. I don’t have to go anywhere, if I want to follow it! If I want to follow my heart, then I just have to be here with all which makes part of me, including my eyes, my ears, my brain, my thoughts, me.
Happy New Year 2015, dear readers, dear friends! Happy Being!
Picture: Our surroundings are a great teachers of being. They don’t hurry anywhere, they just are. I like the expression: “this is where the heart of things lies (or is)”. We never say, that it is going somewhere, the heart of things just is. The picture shows a beautiful park just a few minutes from where we live.
