What Heart Wants

An investigation.

Mystics of the ages have taken the primacy of the human heart in our lives more seriously than religionists, romantics, or scientists. When Whirling Dervishes whirl, they turn counterclockwise, the right side of their body closing in on the left, embracing their own heart as the axis of life.

As Ordinary Mystics (OMs) of today, let’s give a whirl to this question: What does the heart want?

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What I notice first these days is that my heart feels forced upon.

We are told that those who will thrive will be those who can embrace uncertainty and see disruption as an opportunity. I, too, have been writing—at times pontificating—about the imperative of befriending the unknown for those of us who want to love, lead, or create.

The truth, however, is that my heart is not interested in soldiering on. It’s not looking for something easier, but for something entirely different instead.

Instead, I am in my home country of Croatia, sipping espresso at a tiny table in Virada Caffe with a view of the harbour. It’s early morning, and while the day is already hot, the bones in my body still hold the precious cool absorbed from the sea during my early morning swim.

Instead, I am ignoring the fact that my LinkedIn account has just been hacked. Years of posts, articles, endorsements, and ongoing business conversations, as well as other assets that I’ve carefully developed over countless anxious hours and many years, have been wiped out. Gone.

Instead, I am taking a break from the convulsing world for a moment. I choose not to think about the relational, economic, and health implications of the political predicaments that I, you, and all people who care about the common good in the world are facing.

I have three more days, I tell my heart, before I have to give up the smell of salt and sun and come back to the dog-poop littered asphalt of New York City, where I can then face the unknown.

Right now, my heart is not interested in regaining control of the situation or even deciding on the next course of action. Most shockingly, it doesn’t seem to care if I, personally, win or lose in any of it.

It doesn’t fear the fears of my strategic mind, which lives in two columns of pros and cons for every decision. My sadness or fear does not phase it. It doesn’t care about my ledger of happiness.

I let my heart be. And I wait. Until it quietly gives me clues about what it does care about. Let me share two of them.

Clue #1: Having Home

“Where’s my home?” it asks.

It lives in the echo of the city streets, while at the sea, and in the echo of the sea, while at the city streets. So, I answer my heart, “I don’t know.” And as I say it, I realize it’s not because of my bi-continental life. It’s because of the disruption that has been imposed on me, on you, on us all, by forces larger than ourselves. We are all displaced.

“We are a new kind of nomads,” I mansplain to my heart. We are not physically displaced. It’s not armed hordes that are after us. It’s a violent horde of billionaires on their march. It’s political molestation. It’s faith famine.

“But,” I tell my heart, “look up, all of this should be for the best.”

That’s right, I distract and lie to my heart.

It’s because I've been distracting and lying to myself about home.

Home is one of those taken-for-granted words, like mother, that holds immeasurably more in it than the big words we like to use, like God, fuck, or languishing.

Through a one-way six-lane highway called the vagus nerve, the heart sends rich and insistent signals of home need to our brain. As a result, in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help us remember and find home, we have tens of thousands of clues.

These clues were once landmarks, signposts, and natural processes supplying almost infinite information to our wayfinding ancestors. Our hearts used to fall in love with a cliff, a forest, a lake, and a way light appeared or darkness held us all.

In recent evolutionary history, however, the hippocampus has undergone a significant repurposing. Now we have this enormous capacity to belong to a home composed of narratives, ideas, and metaphors. We now navigate through and fall in love with stories, from tiny ones that are just one word long, to big ones like those of a world religion or a philosophical system.

This means that in the past, now, and in the future, we all need a home—all of us. These are heart’s orders.

“We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” ~ Herman Hesse

In high school, I remember humming the song by Lene Lovich as a sort of relief from the challenges that come with having a home, sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes suffocating: “Home is just emotion / Sticking in my throat / Home is good clean living / Home is … I forgot.” At the same time, I carried books of Herman Hesse in my backpack, one of them saying, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

So, Lovich or Hesse?

Now, forty years later, after migrating from one continent to another, from one religion to another, from one vocation to another, and after putting out a mighty effort to embrace uncertainty and use disruption as opportunity, hands down, Herman Hesse won.

Clue #2: Getting Lost

What else does the heart want?

“I want to get lost,” it says.

On the one hand, the heart wants a home. On the other hand, the heart wants to roam.

The heart knows about other hearts, and it gives a damn about the world.

When we are fully alive, as much as we want to be at home, we also want to cross boundaries, take risks for something larger than ourselves, or luck ourselves into a new vocation, relationship, and purpose.

I vary between homing and roaming several times a day. One moment, I feel like everything belongs and all manner of things will be okay, and in the next, I feel like we are maneuvering our kayaks through the white water, heading, possibly, for a waterfall.

We get lost.

It’s inevitable. The fine state of being lost happens every time we break out into a new way of seeing, experiencing, or being in the world. This is part of what it means to be free.

We often cannot achieve what we want, not because we are incapable of doing what needs to be done to get there, but because our calculating, strategic mind does not see the utility in being lost in the process. But the heart does.

It does not care about whether you are comfortable or not. The heart only cares about you being real.

Perhaps being lost is the only time we can meet ourselves and the world in a real way. When we experience being lost, we have the opportunity to shift our attention to a reality that differs from the one we have created. We can meet a stranger both in others and within ourselves. When we are lost, we also give the world around us a chance to find us.

“When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers compassionate acknowledgment that we are built for more than safety: “When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

Being lost is time well spent.

Sometimes, often actually, mindfulness is not enough. To live, we need enchantment. We are meant to get lost in conversation, in making love, in a tale, and in countless other delightful and never-predictable ways.

GPS requires you to decide on your starting point, A, and your ending point, B, before you allow yourself to discover. It’s an enemy of wondering. Maps, AI, and other navigational devices force us to have our heads down.

They make us devalue clues available that are in the world itself. We arrive, without the process of becoming on the way there. Our becoming is short-circuited by instant arrival. As a result, we don’t have a story to tell or a presence to bring to where we arrive.

For that, you have to get lost.

Five Findings

With those two clues, let’s attempt some findings. What does your OM heart want from you? Here are some suggestions to take for a whirl.

1. You don’t have to be clear.

Getting lost is the only way to find your path.

A rule of OMs thumb: When you have an easy answer about where you should go, who you should be, and what you should do, you are very likely on another’s path, mistaking it as your own.

As Joseph Campbell puts it, “If the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else’s.” 

Our true self is and will remain unknown to our conscious mind. We are so close that we can’t see it. It’s okay. If you could name it, it would be the wrong name.

2. You can learn to love that feeling.

How can we be at home and lost in the world?

Heart’s answer does not sound good to our tribal selves: practice embracing the whole world as your home.

John Stilgoe, an outstanding American landscape researcher and theorist from Harvard University, speaks for our hearts: “If I’m lost and I don’t have anyone to ask, I love that feeling.”

There’s no me, you, them.
There’s no present, past, or future.
There’s no certainty, faith, or doubt.

Everything belongs.

I know this is some hardcore mystic stuff, unprovable but true.

3. Rebirth yourself.

In the womb, the child is primordial, as though it existed from the beginning of time. It is wordless, with borders between herself and the environment non-existent.

Then, the infant undergoes a rich experience of being lost that forms the child’s nervous system. It establishes references and distinctions, learns the language and covenants that make up the meanings. You may not remember it, but, reluctantly yet unstopably, you found your way.

Such is every change in identity, whether gradual or instantaneous, throughout our lives. We get reborn, over and over and over again.

Want a new life? Getting lost is the price of admission.

4. Apprentice yourself.

There’s a sense of freedom that only comes with not knowing, even for a moment, who we are, where we are, why we are here, and what’s going on. That’s what the heart wants.

It wants you to apprentice yourself to your life.

As David Whyte puts it:

“What we recognize and applaud as honesty and transparency in an individual is actually the humble demeanor of the apprentice someone paying extreme attention, to themselves, to others, to life, to the next step, which they may survive or they may not, someone who does not have all the answers but who is attempting to learn what they can, about themselves and those with whom they share the journey, someone like everyone else, wondering what they and their society about to turn into.

5. Something quite different.

Without having something you can call your home and without stepping over the edge of your map, you don’t touch either real fears or real joys.

In that home and on that edge is where you learn to listen, feel what others feel, and forge your faith in the future. When you get lost, you become real. And you cannot love, lead, or create if you are not real.

That’s what the heart wants: To live an authentic life in the real world.

When we are properly lost, we are not on the way to eventually recognise, name, conquer, and domesticate the space or stories we live in. We are doing something quite different. We live real life in real time.

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🤗 My fellow OM, I’m glad you are meeting me here on this tiny spot on the screen, and I hope you enjoyed this AI-free writing. Do you have any additions, insights, or intuitions from your experience? Let other OMs know below.

🙏🏼 Thank you for restacking this post! 🙏🏼