Following your heart is my contact sport of choice. For better and worse, I’ve played life like this for 35 years. In the past few years, I added a qualifier: follow your heart, but check the data. This helps me avoid making knee-jerk decisions. I do some research and add some extra time before making any decisions that matter. It’s a safer way to continue following your heart, in spite of the raised stakes that come with being in your mid-30s. I’ve noticed many of the incentives my work and life are throwing at me are these days are like, “Okay, you’ve had your fun, now you need to start playing by the rules.” Heart says hell no.
Asking my partner of 6 years to marry me this past December felt like the first time that following my heart aligned with exactly what society expected of me. And that was really scary too. To follow your heart is to move through life with one part heart-led joy and one part knee-shaking fear. Is there any other way to live your most meaningful life? For me, everything worth becoming originally came from this kind of naive and child-like approach of trusting my gut. The alternative of making meaningful decisions by not doing this, now that’s a scary thought.
I hope that I have the courage to let my heart, with a little input from my rational head, keep making the decisions that matter, even as this wonderful world and its well-meaning fellow travellers make frighteningly aggressive attempts to end this foolishness once and for all. This fire I bring to these brutally challenging mid-30s years sometimes burns those whose enthusiasm for telling me how to show up gets a little too preachy. Must these rough edges be this insecure? To those that have learned the art of quiet confidence, I will always be learning from you.
My main goal this year is to increase my emotional resilience to match the intensity of my work life. Joining a gym and increasing daily meditation to 15mins have made a positive impact. But it’s 2 steps forward, 2 steps back. I’m still a little too willing to care too much about what other people think about me, and sometimes lose sleep and weekends agonising over how I reply to a message that someone outsourced to AI.
Why am I so determined to understand and improve myself when I could just be done with it all, give up and outsource? RAYE’s new album “This music may contain hope” feels like the full artistic expression of what a scary, mentally challenging and confusing time this feels like right now. RAYE is 28 years old at writing, but the best artists have always been ahead of their time. Your mid-30s may very well be best described as an exploration of hope.
The older I get and the more years that pass alongside the miracle that is my fiancée, the more convinced I am that the purpose of my life is to be a great partner to her. This way of looking at the world has helped me discover some peace within myself, so I’m trusting it more and more.
I always thought my work would be where I’d make my impact on the world. First it was amateur golf, then comedy writing, then producing TV shows, and for the last 11 years, education technology. Since an unexpected and heartbreaking redundancy, these past three and a half years have been relentlessly focused on unconditional giving. It used to be all about what I could get, but that got old and it didn’t work. My heart told me it was time to try being more like the people whose life stories most resonated with me from the books. People like Bob Chapman, Bill Campbell and Adam Rifkin. Being fully committed to unconditional giving has been so much harder to sustain that I imagined, because unlike the people in the books, my partner and I don’t have a lot of financial security. Has my heart led me astray or can I keep the faith that this is all part of the story? It’s never been my thing to do things half-hearted.
I look at my partner, who has also been on a journey of following her heart these past few years. She is a fantasy colouring book artist. Last month, she published her 7th book of 40 original hand-drawn illustrations. Only last month did sales skyrocket ‘out of nowhere.’ It’s been breathtaking to suddenly see how her years of chiselling stone have started to give way to Michelangelo.
This has been an exploration of the question “For what am I willing to suffer?” I try and choose my suffering wisely because I think that my most meaningful life, the one it’s my destiny to live, depends on it. I can choose unimaginable suffering, or I can give away my agency to the well-meaning. It’s gonna be alright, it’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be alright, it’s gonna be okay. Follow your heart and brace for occasional catastrophic impact. It’s a prerequisite for living out your life’s mission.
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Art by Sierra Truong