Category: left brain

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Along the Way

Back again.

This does feel like a chore. I seem to have slipped back into that demotivated state where I really don’t want to do anything. Maybe it’s the heat – doesn’t help, that’s for sure. That’s quite an odd phrase for me to use: ‘for sure’. Slipping back thirty-odd years into Dallas-speak – maybe it’s the heat – though it’s nowhere near as hot as it was there, but then nobody went outdoors at this time of year, they stayed inside and froze in the air-conditioning.

This morning, doing my exercises in the spare room with the window open, I felt stifled. Usually I have a high tolerance for heat, but this is getting even me down.

Taoism – must’ve been in a pretentious mood the day I mentioned it. How about Existentialism? Let’s throw that into the mix.

My yoga teacher said (a while ago now, must be, because we were in the Community Centre at the time, not the park), that the difference between fate and destiny is that Destiny is the true purpose of your life, what you should be doing if you allow everything to happen as intended (by whom? The Universe, or God, or whoever). But Fate is what happens to you anyway if you’re not following your Destiny. I liked that, I thought it was a nice distinction, even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘True Purpose’ to the Universe that underlies everything that happens. Why should that be? I suppose, to my ‘left brain’ (if we want to go back to that cliché) it’s quite clever, because it allows an ‘out’, as positive-thinking based philosophies often do: ‘Oh well, things didn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected, but that’s because you didn’t want it deeply enough, or you didn’t believe in it enough, or because the Universe has a different plan for you, which you can’t see right now, but one day you’ll see why it happened this way.’

Looking back over life, or history, it’s easy to see the Way that brought us here, the turning points, the (sometimes) tiny events that can trigger enormous consequences. We look back, and we construct a pattern (because that’s what humans do), and we can see that, well, that had to happen for this to be the way things are now. But we can’t know what would have happened if that point hadn’t turned, or had turned in a different direction – we can speculate, perhaps, but we can never know.

The example that just popped into my head wasn’t ‘tiny’ at the time – in fact, I’ve always thought of it as a tragedy, until just recently: the fact that my grandmother was widowed with five children at the age of forty – but if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have moved from Manchester to Cleethorpes, and my parents would never have met – pretty fundamental, from my point of view (and my children’s and grandchildren’s).

More along this thought path another day, perhaps.

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More Musings

Another morning, another empty white screen.

Still reading that book. It’s moved on from left brain thinking to ways of developing the right brain: yoga, tai chi, meditation etc. The irony is that my PhD thesis was all about managing a world where causes are reductive and impacts are holistic. Trying to find left brain categories for right brain phenomena when language itself is suspect because it immediately binds thought into its own limitations. I used to get so excited about all that stuff, until I realised that this is in itself the problem, that the two can never be reconciled, and that’s why the world is in such a mess, and probably why my head is in such a mess too. I didn’t use the language of left-and-right-brains twenty five years ago, but the ideas are directly comparable.

How can I express myself more clearly? Reading back that last paragraph, I thought: it’s about control. We try to understand causes and control them, but the problems with this are legion: how do we identify the fundamental causes? How do we find ways of controlling them? How do we implement the controls and sanctions? How long does it take before we come up against the unintended consequences of those controls and sanctions? And what has happened in the meantime to the overall impacts we were trying to control in the first place? I could go on, but I’ve probably confused you more than enough already (if there is a ‘you’ still reading this).

And how, if at all, does this relate to my dyspraxia? The author of that book would probably say that my right brain is currently working out something that my left brain is preventing me from recognising.

Yesterday was Skype-therapy day, I read out to the therapist the list of ‘wisdom’ bullet points that I posted earlier in the week, and I thought I was being quite tongue-in-cheek about it, but part way down the list I started to get tearful. Because all those contradictions and over-simplifications are what makes up who I am, and can’t be wished away by well-intended platitudes, or by trying to make me laugh at myself when all I want to do is cry. Maybe, in the context of what I was saying, they’re a set of left-brain ‘solutions’ to the holistic right-brain question of who I am and how I get by in this world without shattering into a million fragments.

I’m not saying dyspraxia explains all of that. Of course, it’s a left-brain category and hence by its nature draws arbitrary lines in the sand – this side and that side, inside and outside. But the more I look into it, the more I unravel the strands of how I became this self-contradictory person, the more I can see how well it fits.

Yesterday I joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. I have a sense of ‘coming out’ and being – not exactly proud (I don’t do ‘pride’) but maybe ‘honest’.   

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Musings

Memory plays funny tricks. I’ve been transferring some of my old cassettes onto the PC, via a USB cassette player, bought for me by ex-hubby as a Christmas present, but which has spent most of the last decade stored away in its box. I haven’t been doing it the last few days – since the weekend in fact – because I realised the rooms on either side of my study were probably used as bedrooms and I didn’t want to disturb my neighbours too early in the morning.

But when I sat down this morning I had Joe Jackson’s ‘Breaking Us In Two’ in my head and thought: I don’t want to copy anything this morning, just do what I normally do, which is to shuffle the list and let Windows media player go randomly through my music. But when I opened it, the song which started up was ‘Breaking Us In Two’, so presumably it was the last track played and had stuck at the back of my mind from four or five days ago, or whenever the last time was that I sat here with music playing.

I started writing yesterday but everything I was thinking was so dark that I didn’t really want to go on. Feeling much the same again today. I think I am coming towards the time when this all seems so overwhelmingly futile that I give up altogether. ‘If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything’. It’s been quite a good run: four months, roughly 120 days (barring those I missed), 60k words.

‘I’m reading a book which puts forward evidence from research in neuroscience to show that what we call the ‘self’ is not single and fixed for any individual but rather plural and malleable, and hence, in a sense, illusory. I don’t find this contentious, in fact I’m rather surprised that anybody would. It’s rather like saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’ – there may be no specific institution or body which bears that name, but the influence of the web of interactions, rules, structures, relationships etc on the actions of people and organisations leads to impacts in the physical world.’

That’s how I started yesterday, which I suppose isn’t too grim, but the rest of what I was thinking was. I read some more of the book after that, and found that the author was saying that the ‘self’ is created by contrast with everything which is outside the self. Which surprised me, because there I was thinking the other way round, that it is embedded in a network of influences (nature and nurture) and is the product of those. I’m not a psychologist, and maybe I’m not understanding the terms properly – what’s the difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘personality’, for example?

He went on to say that the left brain operates by looking for patterns and telling stories. Which sounds very like me.

Maybe I will keep writing – at least, when I’ve read some more.