In the quiet of the early morning with the rain falling in drifts outside my window, as the motion of the rocking chair lulls me into a sense of reverie, I ponder over the mystery of the heart. I find my thoughts drifting to that sometimes near debilitating pull between what one's heart feels and what their mind knows. It is a real thing, you know - the disconnection between your conscious waking mind and your deep down gut feelings and beliefs. The part of our brain that controls emotional reasoning is located on the opposite side of the part that controls logical reasoning. We have an "emotional mind" and a "logical mind", and somewhere in the middle of that is what some may call the "wise mind". It is so difficult to find the balance between the two and to rest comfortably in the wise mind space.
Living in a wise mind space is possible. It requires the ability to recognize and be aware of both your logical thoughts and your emotional thoughts. Many people are either ruled by their emotions or rely too heavily on logic, with little room for the other in their methods and thought processes. To live in a wise mind state, one needs to be capable of not letting either one overtake their decision making. Both the logical and the emotional are necessary. One wouldn't make a decision (at least probably not a good decision) to buy a car based on emotion alone. Logic would come along and say, "Hey! That's too expensive! You don't need a vehicle that seats 7. There is only 1 of you." Similarly, one would not choose a life partner based solely on logic (I would hope). We don't choose who we fall in love with based on facts such as age, hair color, height, annual salary, location, etc. I'm sure we would like to think that we do, but we don't. Those things obviously do affect who we choose, but they are merely background noise compared to the emotional connections we share with a person.
So what happens when your logical mind is telling you that it's time to let go of an unhealthy relationship, but your heart is still begging you to hold on? Have you ever felt as if your emotions were scattered, as if you couldn't "make up your mind" regarding a "matter of the heart"? That would be your logical mind wrestling with your emotional mind and neither one really being able to push the other to the edge of the mat. This is what happens when "the head and the heart collide", so to speak. Your emotions are still tangled up in the past, all of the memories you have shared with someone, not wanting to let go of the high that you get from being in love, not wanting to give up because of what could be. Your mind, however, is trying to tell you something. Logic dictates that if the relationship does not help you grow, if you do not feel loved or safe because of the actions or repeated hurtful words of another, that it will most likely always be that way.
Things such as friends or family full of well meaning advice do not help. Half will tell you to follow your heart, logic be damned. They will try to sell you on romantic notions of happily ever after and the concept that "you only live once, so do not waste a minute of it. Tell someone you love them before it's too late". The other half will tell you something along the lines of "there is a difference between giving up and letting go". They will try to sell you on the concept of valuing yourself above all else and learning to let go of things that no longer serve you. Both have merit. Both sides of the argument have equal value. So what should you do? If you've stacked the blocks of the logical and then stacked the blocks of the emotional side by side, you have then created a tower in which to sit upon. I suppose the only thing to do now is to wait and hope that the tower remains stable, that the blocks of one side don't overpower the blocks of the other side and push you off.
It feels a bit like inaction, doesn't it, to just sit there and wait? Well, you could climb down. You could go find someone else's tower of blocks to pull apart (in most cases, it will be the blocks of your partner/significant other). You could push the whole tower over and walk away to start a new tower. You could stand at the bottom of the tower and remove blocks one by one, hoping that it doesn't all come crashing down on your head. You could encase the entire tower in ice, never allowing the tower to either grow or topple. Or you could accept that your instincts will tell you what to do when the time is right, and all you need to do is sit on top of that tower and wait to hear from them. In case you haven't caught on yet, to sit on top of the tower and wait is what your wise mind is telling you to do. Life is not stagnant. Something will happen to that tower, no matter what you do. You can take it apart yourself, driving yourself crazy and stressing yourself out in the process, or you can just wait and see who comes along to help you build or take it down.
Taking the advice to do nothing is never easy. We are creatures that need to feel as if we are being productive, but sometimes being "productive" means letting things happen in their own time without forcing them. And so I sit here in my rocking chair, listening to the clock tick and the rain fall, and I let go of my ideals of "productivity". I give up trying to keep all my blocks from falling or being damaged. I'm just going to wait and see what happens.
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