Better to lose your head following your heart than to lose your heart following your head.
From The Sum of All One's Mistakes, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
A hawk came through the yard at noon and every bird in the hedge went still except one sparrow, who flew straight out across the open grass toward the feeder. She made it. I spent the afternoon deciding whether she was brave or simply hungry, and then deciding the question was worse than either answer. For years I held that the careful ones live longest and that this settled it; I had the arithmetic and I was pleased with it. But I have watched birds grow so careful they forgot what the hedge was for, and that is a different kind of dying. Better to lose your head following your heart than to lose your heart following your head, I wrote, and then sat a while with the fact that the hawk is real and does not care what I wrote.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- After all is said and done, there is more to say and do.
- You don’t get extra credit for the life you meant to live.
- Doing something halfway does not get you halfway there.
- After you ask how much you want something, ask how wise you are to want it.
- Before you start pushing a rock up a hill, make sure it’s a hill you want to climb.
- Ride the current from within if you want to make it all the way to the sea.