Life is not a uniform eternal plain where you can see the landscape clearly all at once. It’s a meandering snake of going around, under and above things, of overcoming, searching, finding, loosing, loving and learning. It’s a road littered with forks and multiple choices, a perversely exciting game of memory and distortion in which most of the time you have no idea if one decision is better than the other and some you won’t be able to ever know unless you try.

So you’ll get stuck, paralyzed into inaction trying to approach this decisions from all angles, you’ll conduct a personal pole with loved ones and friends to try and see where the “public opinion” leans on this one aaaand- you’ll get conflicting (although prevalently well-meaning) advice on the follow your heart-brain dichotomy. There is no wedge between these, it’s all head. Your heart is a very simple relentless thing with one prime directive – to keep you alive. It just pumps blood so don’t give it more responsibility than it’s able to bare. What you feel as your heart dropping, or being broken or opening, or heart palpitations of excitement or fear is just an echo in a well-engineered machine such as your body is. The heart muscle just reacts to the flood of chemicals and neurotransmitters and hormones released (or triggered to release) by the brain which is trying to coordinate the whole body to be in tune with a given situation. Thoughts and emotions are both products of the brain and are codependent. Change how you think about something and you’ll change how you feel about it, change your sour disposition deliberately into gratitude and your thoughts will begin to follow, they are a part of the same mechanism and you need both.

The right way to choose a decision or a direction is to ask yourself a question and listen to the echo response in your body – Will you be proud of this in a week, a month, a year, 5 years or will you be ashamed for doing it and try to renounce it? Sometimes you just won’t be able to know right away and you’ll fell dissonance either way you choose, and that is all right. If this happens it means you’re torn inside pulling in different directions by irreconcilable wishes and desires. Some alone time might help clear this. Withdraw from the pressure and expectations, seclude yourself and insulate your core from advice, detach yourself from what is expected or proper, from what is usual or standard, from the sensible choice (if sensible and security are your primary motivation triggers than choose sensibly). Don’t confuse the availability of what you think is “information” with their correctness – not all information is good or valuable, more is not always better and most of the times when you let someone else tip the scales of a decision you’re just leaving yourself a free pass for blaming in case it doesn’t work out.

Make your own decision, stand by it, see it through and accept all what comes with it. There is no heart brain split, there is just you and knowing yourself enough to at least have a chance in accurately predicting is this something you’ll be proud to have done. And if there really is no better or worse choice here, if there is no way you can discern, in that case stop beating yourself up – whatever you choose is equally valid and your job after choosing is just to stop the “what if” chatter in the mind. Choose wisely, choose poorly – just choose and stand by it or correct the course if there is a chance to do so. You won’ be able to see the next for on the road if you don’t choose which one to take now.