Nuggets & Gems
Left brain and right brain
The differences between and separation of right and left brain are real, not a figment of imagination or of popular culture.
I have started reading Iain McGilchrist’s book ‘The Matter with Things’. It is about neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and culture. In the early parts he describes how and why it is that differences have emerged between the two hemispheres of our brains and the importance of those differences. The key thing I have learned so far is that the right brain has developed to survey the whole environment and be aware of threats or opportunities existing in any direction in the present moment, while the left brain has developed to pan close, sustained attention to one thing at a time in a narrow field, to model and simplify the world so it can be manipulated. The right brain is concerned with immediate reality, the left brain conceptualises, models and manipulates, and the separation of the two hemispheres is more marked in the higher mammals than in evolutionarily older life forms.
Our modern, western culture tends to privilege left-brain development at the expense of gratitude for what our right hemisphere’s offer.
Reference: McGilchrist, I. (2022). The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. London, Perspectiva Press.
Living with ambiguity and uncertainty
Rainer Maria Rilke writes: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes (p.27):
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I find this passage inspiring and beautiful, an encouragement towards living where not all is certain and we cannot be sure of things. I have long held the notion of an unanswered question, or a dilemma, is like a cup; rather than fret about the lack of an immediate solution, just hold it out there and in good time the Universe will fill the cup with an answer.
Many decisions are just beyond the simple stacking up of pro’s and con’s. An answer will turn up when it wants to.
Reference: Maria Rilke, R. (2023). Letters to a Young Poet. London, Penguin Classics.
The importance and expression of feelings
Feelings are real, they are physical, and they tell us important truths.
In Eve Selis’s song See Me With Your Heart (https://eveselis.bandcamp.com/track/see-me-with-your-heart) there is a line:
“Feelings shouldn’t hide invisible inside…”
In much of western culture, still, it is held that feelings and emotions should not have a place in external life or decision-making. People bottle feelings up, hide them, suppress them.
Yet, if you have a feeling, what do you actually experience? Is it a thought that passes through, or is there an accompanying physical sensation in your body? If so, where?
A feeling is in part a physical thing. Suppressed feelings do not disappear. If they are pushed away, they will reappear in some form or another, sooner or later, and potentially in damaging form. Therefore, it is better to allow and express feelings when they come and to explore why they arise and what they are telling us.