I Have Better Things To Do With My Heart

 

I have better things to do with my heart.

Have you considered your heart recently?

How is it doing?

Free.  Torn.  Content.  Pre-occupied.
Open.  Guarded.  Hidden.  Seen.

How is your heart?

I am usually neck deep and sinking before I remember that I have better things to do with my heart.
Before I realize I have a choice in the matter.  I have some control in where I invest my heart.

Seeking the balance between an open heart and the mandate to guard one’s hearts is tricky. 

Quite possibly, impossible.

As we enter a new season, Lent for some, Spring for all, it is my intention to be discerning about where I invest my heart.
To consider my heart.
I tend towards passionate as personalities go.  I tend towards rescuer/fixer.
I tend towards don’t just stand there, do something.  (Fools rush in and all that.)
I tend towards believing in and for everyone but myself.

It is a false modesty.   And I set myself up for disappointment.
Disappointment.  Being un-appointed?
Removing the appointment.   Appointment fail!

Inspired by newly forming buds forcing the last lingering dead leaves from the trees I completed a six by four foot painting the week of Valentines Day.   I titled It, “I Have Better Things to Do With My Heart.”  Titled out of hope and frustration. 

Frustration with myself for allowing my heart to become caught up in unnecessary and invented drama.   While some thrive on adrenaline it is not my cup of tea.  And yet.  And yet I allowed another’s overly dramatic inclinations to infect my heart.

Looking on the finished painting, “I Have Better Things To Do With My Heart,” I realized it was not just a painting the confluence of the last vestiges of winter and the harbingers of spring.   I painted a self-portrait.  A portrait of letting go and making room for possibility.   It set me up for freedom that would be offered ever so gently at a pot luck luncheon the next day.

Letting go.
Getting help.
Clarity.

Free of the fog of a seven month headache I can think again.
Things that I intended to do and hoped to do and needed to do did not happen.
I am rejecting (daily) the temptation to “catch up.”
I am committed to starting  where I am, today.
It is the only place I can start.
I endeavor to cease the practice of self-condemnation.
I am releasing where I might have been had I more wisely invested my heart.
(I am preaching to myself.)

I had to be ready.  I needed friends call me forward.

I am not sure what forward will look like.  I am re-evaluating
the last 18 months and making changes.
Changes that I was incapable of making a year ago.
Changes to equip the artist entrepreneur in me.

My art and I have been in hiding.

Time to embrace Spring!