Or maybe you’re in the right place for your heart? ‘Follow your heart’ is a sweet yet clichéd bit of advice that we’ve all heard one too many times. Perhaps that’s why I started to take it literally.

I’ve always had more of an artistic brain than a mathematical one, preferring at school to doodle on my maths sheets rather than answer the questions. So it makes sense that, rather than seeing the Fibonacci sequence, structural configurations or other such logical patterns around me, I see hearts.

“Whether it be the shape of a rock, a well-formed shadow or the bubbles in a coffee, it never fails to make me smile when a heart crops up”

One day back in sixth form, I happened to notice a hole in a tree that looked like a heart. I thought it was charming and rather unusual, so I took a picture of it to send to a friend. Fast forward to today, and I now have a folder on my phone with over 200 pictures of ‘naturally-occurring hearts’, as I call them. It sounds ridiculous, but once you start to look for them, they appear everywhere.

Looking for these hearts started out as just a bit of fun, but now it adds extra meaning into each ever-busy Cambridge day. The importance of maintaining the comfortable and the stable in the mania of Cambridge life cannot be understated, and it seems now that I don’t look for the hearts so much as they look for me. This sounds like an exaggeration, but I never go out with the intention of finding heart shapes – they just appear, and I always manage to spot them. Whether it be the shape of a rock, a well-formed shadow or the bubbles in a coffee, it never fails to make me smile when a heart crops up. And that’s the key part. It’s easy to forget that joy can be found in the simplest of places, the smallest pockets, when we are all striving to achieve so much. Sometimes, seeing a leaf shaped like a perfect heart is achievement enough.

“It’s a touching, if slightly corny, reminder that love is the undercurrent connecting us all”

These hearts are also a reminder that art is everywhere if you know where to look. Capturing them in photos ensures my creativity is always just a click away. The blessing of modern technology means that I can share my photos with friends and family, too, spreading the joy and the art around me. It’s become a way of keeping connected – friends and family members will frequently send me pictures of hearts that they have found, and occasionally I will even receive a heart picture from someone I haven’t spoken to in a while. It’s a touching, if slightly corny, reminder that love is the undercurrent connecting us all. You’d also be surprised by how many people I’ve discovered that do a similar thing with a symbol that speaks to them – I’ve known people to have spirals, butterflies, or specific numbers that crop up for them. It just goes to show how, even in a post-truth, digital era, we look to the universe to send us signs.

So next time you’re out and about, take a moment to connect with what’s around you and see if you can spot any hearts – it’s not as difficult as you might think. It seems that that one overplayed Christmas film has a point when it tells us that “if you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around”.