In an earlier post, I commented on how we sometimes need to act our way into the right feelings. Today’s lesson is similar in that it deals with a back door way of discovering something about ourselves.
If given proper warning, most of us would likely answer questions about what we value most with respectable, principled statements that others would find admirable. But there can be a wider gap than we’d like to think between what we say we value and what we actually do with our lives.
The graphic at the top right of this post was what triggered today’s comments. I ran across it while searching for something else and thought it worthy of attention. If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind wanders.
It’s probably easier for other people to honestly answer the question of what we value than it is for us because they have the ability to observe us from their vantage point – to see how we live, how we work, how we treat others, how we spend our time and money. Of course, they don’t see everything there is to know about us because we may choose to keep some things secret.
One valid approach, then, is to just ask others around us where they think our heart is – what is it they believe we value most? A good, honest friend or acquaintance should be able to answer that from their perspective. The graphic above, however, gives us another way to decipher where our heart is: look at where our mind wanders. Our heart is likely close by.
We may not always be able to pursue all of our dreams, but it sure would be a shame only to have our heart in some other place in our mind instead of where we actually spend our lives.
Leap year lesson #141 is Look where your mind wanders to find your heart.
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