Follow?

Follow your heart or follow your head? An age old question posed in various forms over the ages. There is no right answer though, is there?

In all my (admittedly few) experiences with life so far, I've realised one thing - what I want to do is never what they want me to do. Who's they? They is family, they is friends, they is peers, they is people I respect, they is all the unspoken and unseen parts of society I somehow seem to be offending. Every time I decide to follow my heart and break free of societal shackles, there is a gentle tap on my shoulder. When I turn around, there is a multitude of questions staring me in the face, chief of which always is 'Are you doing the right thing?' Accompanying these questions are the thousands of faceless people staring at me like zombies like I’ve committed a terrible crime and should be ostracized from society forever.

It's like I've broken free from the darkness of a dark tunnel onto a beautiful green hillside, but there is always something that draws me back to that dark underbelly of the earth, teeming with rats. The rat race is a really apt term, isn't it?

A lot of this probably stems from my own ego. Acceptance and satisfaction often go hand-in-hand, but think again. Do they really? Societal acceptance and fitting in with the rest (and often bettering them) might give you an ego boost, but at the end of the day, you're still a rat in the darkness. It's always a choice one has to make - a choice between doing what everyone's doing and doing it better than them or doing what one wants to, at the risk of ridicule. Not always an easy choice to make. As I said, follow your heart or follow your head? Because in life, there is no middle path.