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.