You may have heard of Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist who had a stroke at the age of 37. Her deep understanding of what was happening to her own brain made the experience transformative for her. She recovered, she wrote a book, it did well. I’d heard about it, but had never seen her speak until a friend sent me the link to this astonishing video (thank you, Tommaso, it’s just amazing).
Taylor made think, and cry, and feel immense wonder and joy at the possibilities within us. Maybe she’ll do that for you too.
(The talk runs about 20 minutes. Here’s a direct link in case you need it.)
How do I talk about how this makes me feel, this simple and powerful idea — just step into my right brain, anytime I choose, as easy as taking my next breath. Reach from the solitude of self into some infinite space where being human means being part of something bigger than ourselves. Except that the thing that is bigger than us is within us. That’s what it is to be human, to be larger inside than outside. To find that I am — that we all are, every single one of us — wide and deep, that we carry within us giant waves and great canyons and vast ecstatic silence, everything, everything.
Is she right? Can we really have that anytime we want?
Well, I just did. Just then. I had to come back into my left brain to talk about it, because that’s how it works, but as near as I can tell, I took a breath and I thought about stepping away and stepping into; and I looked out the window at the gray sky heavy with rain that will be thin and chilly when it comes: autumn has arrived between one day and the next, the morning darker, the trees a different green, the sun turning away. Beautiful. A time of wind and shadows and possibility. All over the world, people lived that instant of their lives and I felt as if we all took our next breath together….
The right brain is not an unfamiliar or frightening place for me. I’m an artist; I live in the midst of ongoing conversation between my two brains, because it is my work to organize my emotional response to the world so I can share it with other people. The right brain channeled through the left. There’s no writing, no music, no painting or dance or drama without them both. There is no story, at least not the kind that has any meaning for me — story in which the discipline of form and the framework of structure draw me into an experience that is immediate and emotional. The left brain opening the door so that the right brain can charge through and grab on tight; and then the story dances me from one space to the other, back and forth, back and forth… It takes my breath away.
It’s astonishing to be human. I love it. It’s easy, it’s hard, it hurts, it’s ecstasy. I find more and more that what I want is not to be balanced, but to be able to find my balance again and again. To find the balance between risk and growth and stupid choices and smart ones; to move between hope and its opposite, which for me these days is not despair but an increasingly clear sense that it doesn’t matter whether things work out the way I want: what matters is that I am being human. And maybe that’s enough: with all this enormous landscape inside me, maybe it is enough to explore it until the end of my days, without so much worry about whether it’s going exactly to plan. To find the balance between the present and the past and the future: between the right brain and the left. Between all of my selves. Between me and you.
Today is my birthday. It’s a good day to think about these things, a lovely present to laugh and cry and look at the sky and feel, for just an instant, all of us out there together.
Kelley, you are a poet. I will treasure this post.
I’d watched that video a few months ago and it made me cry. I watched it again today and it made me cry. It is a reminder of how glad and grateful I am to be alive and able to experience the colors and sounds and textures and flavors of being human. You put it so well, it makes me feel larger inside than I am outside.
Happy Birthday. Your days and nights are a gift your words carry to each of us. Thank you.
And because I’m stubborn and proud and donât know how to receive without giving something in return, some simple but earnest presents.
Happy birthday, dear Kelley. I continue to learn so much with every visit here. I wish I could send you a gift but you seem to have most everything well in order. So here, from my heart:
May you be well.
May you be happy.
May you dwell in peace.
Ditto to your mother and father who gave us you.
Karina and Jan, thank you both so much for the kind thoughts. I am grateful.
K
A truly mind opening video and your commentary is equally powerful
Hi Kelley,
First, belated happy birthday!
Second, thank you for posting this. It is very power and amazing. It tests my imagination – the boundaries of who and how I am. It stretches what it means and/or can mean to be human. Its religious, it’s drug induced, it’s mind altered. Literally.
I thought of my mother – she died over the course of 5 or 6 hours from an aneurysm. Though we, her family, only knew she was dying for an hour or so. I am hopeful that my mother experienced such a thing as Jill explains. I have mostly tried to not think about what it was like for her – the agony of the head ache that led to the call for an ambulance.
I also thought of Solitaire’s incarceration.
Thanks again – it has brought tears and a jumbled mixture of left-side that includes some odd form of hope.
Ashley, I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Robin, you know I’m interested in all manner of things about being human, and yes, this one really did it for me too. It is so… so direct, so personal and so powerful.
I’m so sorry to hear about your mother, and the heartache of believing that she suffered. But if Taylor’s experience is any indication, then yes, I’m hopeful too that it was like that for your mother. I hope it may be like that for me when it’s my turn. If there is anything beyond this life, then that sense of expansion and connection, the sense of dropping the baggage and the boundaries, seems like an excellent way to get there.
Happy Birthday! (belated)
I love this post!
It reminds me of something you wrote a few years ago, in the pub. It was about Autumn…how it looked and felt just right. I’ve gone back to that post several times. Then one day, about two years ago, I went looking for it, and it wasn’t there. The post was still there, but the part I fell in love with was gone. Thankfully, I did copy that part into my notebook. I’m going to look for it….
Hi Lindsey. Yikes, really? It’s not usual for me to go back and chop stuff… but there were many glitches in Virtual Pint over the years. If you find the text and have time, would you share it with me? Would love to jog my memory…
Thanks!
I’ll post one of many more thoughts I’ve had on this. What if the hemmorhage would have been on the right side?? I’d very much like to hear the description of that experience as well.
So much research occuring out there on how the right/left schism isn’t as rigid as once thought. TBI thrivors recover all kinds of abilities though the region of the brain injured is still “gone”. I like to think of it as something like ping-pong; If the place it’s supposed to stick to on the other side is no longer there – it bounces back and somehow finds a place to nestle in and call home! Truly intriguing stuff. Electro-chemical soup.
Here it is!
“I love autumn- it smells and looks and feels just right, a little wild, a little sad, with unexpected moments that feel like some internal space has just opened wide.”
Robin, yes, I know a little about this ability of the brain to “re-route” signals, to find new pathways back to physical abilities or mental skills. All these things going on in a lump of tissue, generally with no “thought” or awareness from us in our everyday lives. Just astonishing.
I’ve seen brains before, but never one with the spinal cord attached and waving in the breeze. It made my brain more real to me somehow. Such complexity that must be handled by these things that look so vulnerable when they are held in someone’s hand. It’s amazing.
Lindsey, thanks so much. I have no idea why that went missing, but I will be happy to put it back if you can tell me what VP entry it was supposed to be in.
(shakes head and wanders off for more caffeine…)