Follow Your Heart

I couldn't be happier than this. A colleague from Stuttgart, Susanne, sent me this, a novel titled "Follow Your Heart" by Susanna Tamaro. We've been writing one another emails for about a year. We shared secrets and stories. Though we've never met each other yet, but I feel grateful knowing her. She's twice elder than me, a gentle and wise lady indeed. The book she gave is a perfect gift for my reading appetite.

The novel is about confession of an elderly woman before her approaching death. She wrote letters to granddaughter she raised but now estranged and living in far-off America. It's a story of love, of words unspoken, of lives wasted, of disclosure of truth and lie, of wisdom and inspiration.

I cried a lot reading it. Sometimes I went too emotional, I would stopped at any page, waited for few days to eventually move on to the next page. Many parts of the story resembles to mine. I've no idea whether it's just coincidence or the nature takes its course, but I had similar incidents with the story. Reading the book made me understand how it feels like for an elderly woman to face daughter’s callousness. There are so much lessons from the story, it took me a while to brood over my own life. Have I completely followed my heart?

One part I really like the most is at the ending where there’s written:

“When so many roads open up before you, you don’t know which way to take, don’t pick one at random, sit down and wait…. Stay still, be quiet, and listen to your heart. Then, when it speaks, get up and go where it takes you.”