Hi Heart! Hi Head!
Thank you for sharing your dilemma with me. It would be an understatement to point out that you both are in a place of immobilizing indecision. For days, or months, or maybe even years, you guys have been grappling with the same issue. Your choices are…well…frankly…there are just one too bloody many! On the spectrum of solutions, you’re stuck with two polar opposites buffered by a shit-storm of gray. Peachy.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I bet both of your approaches have been similar. Pros and cons list drafted. Mitigating circumstances weighed. Hopes, fears, and dreams considered. It doesn’t matter that you, Head, are master of logic while you, Heart, are slave to feelings. In the end, you cannot even come to a decision within each of yourselves, much more between yourselves.
Head, you are such that if A>pain and Z<pain, then Z it is. But…you also know that sometimes pain=growth=good, therefore pain=good. So then the choice is A, right?
Heart, to you, neither A nor Z can even be quantified. A is what you want wrapped in barbed wire and the masochist in you can’t help but untangle it. Z is a shiny bauble, one that you also deeply desire, but it would mean letting go of A and the familiarity of everything.
In between these is the gray. Almost happy and almost sad souls hang out in the gray. The gray is home to compartmentalization. How do you pack away and store the negative things so that you can move on with the positive?
To mitigate the finality of choosing A or Z, many heads and hearts hobble along in the gray. Some realize that this is where they truly need to be and may even flourish. Others know it’s just a bandaid for the inevitable. The question for these heads and hearts is really if they should gently pull the bandaid off or should they rip it away with one quick flick of the wrist.
You see, choices A or Z require total acceptance of your situation. There is no compromise. Choosing the polar opposites most often means confronting what you fear the most. Going after what you want is thrilling but can be fraught with fear. What if you don’t get what you want? What if you do? What if what you want is not all it’s cracked up to be and the sacrifices you’ve made were all in vain—you know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
So you see, Heart and Head, you are truly stuck. What advice do I have? Take a breath, then replace fear with curiosity. Let’s be real, you already know what you want, you just haven’t figured out how to get it. Pick it and when you follow through, be curious about how it would play out. Whenever you feel the dread beginning to take over, stop yourself and say, “Hey I’m so curious about how it’s going to turn out.” Make it into a little game. Take the heaviness out of it all. Fear carries consequence and foreboding. Curiosity seems more like a light-hearted inquiry.
The hope is that through being curious, you eventually work your way up to being more confident about making your current decision as well as making future ones. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but hey, cats have nine lives. You’ll still have another eight, and as we know, practice makes progress!
Happy reading,
Olanta
AproProse Category: Welcome to AproProse, a play on the word ‘apropos’ (meaning relating to, concerning). This category is where I collect my more creative prose that relate to one topic or another in my pursuit of progress. I hope you enjoy and can relate to the post’s sentiments. At the very least, I hope you have a good read.
Photo by Juan Camilo Alvarado © 2016 Just Me, Maybe You, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Ok, this article is so confusing, I don’t know what I just read. Yes, your head and heart seems to be having a conversation but it is still confusing to me.
Hi Carlton,
So sorry for the confusion and thank you for letting me know. In this post, I wanted to address the complexities of making a really hard decision. Many times I hear people say something along the lines of my head says no but my heart says yes. I find that indecision can occur for many reasons, one of which is when the head and the heart can’t agree. I humanized (anthropomorphized) the head and the heart and was pretending to be an advice columnist or a couples mediator to a someone’s head and heart, which are both at odds within themselves as well as between themselves. I felt by highlighting the process of the head’s and the heart’s “thinking” I could better empathize with, and explain the battle that some people face in dilemmas. Hope this helped explain what I was going for.
The curiosity approach is an interesting way to think about this. hmmmm….curious. I like “practise makes progress”.
I tried it out and I felt less intimidated by the situation. It could be another tool in our arsenal to not get bogged down by life’s challenges. As for the “practice makes progress” bit, one of my favorite motivational speakers, Les Brown, says this a lot. Thanks for reading and for your comments!