Wednesday is writing group on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month. Looks like we will have ten folks this evening if the RSVP's hold. I want to write well tonight, something deep and dark but hopeful. We'll see. Date last night was nice. He was a lot of fun and it was good to be out with a gent, laughing and flirting. And yet....
So, The Brain on Love, an article I just read in the NYT. The first paragraph has to grab you.
A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.Literally transforms you!!! Remember when your mother told you, you are what you eat? That might have been true, but apparently it wasn't the whole story! What we pay the most attention to defines us, transforms us! Or as Liza would say if you spend your time with garbage, you end up smelling like garbage. First the smell and then you become garbage. Think she was cautioning her kids about their choice of friends.
There is a line in the article (here is the link - The Brain on Love) that blows me away, "Every great love affair begins with a scream." The author goes on to describe the love affair between a mother and a child - the bond that "feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose." I've always thought that when a baby starts experiencing separation anxiety - when his mother leaves the room, it's as if his leg or arm were leaving the room. There are relationships where physical boundaries dissolve. Apparently this mother/baby love affair is stamped in our brains - "the body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent".
Read this next. Astounding:
When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.I think we already know this, already feel that when we are in love there is "someone" else in the room - as Stephen Covey would say, "a 3rd alternative", a one plus one equals three. I tasted this and described it in my writing, the cleaving together of two souls, then the cleaving apart when the relationship ended. It was almost a literal death.
Our author goes on to talk about how happy relationships actually relieve stress, heal wounds - the brain recycles the bad - replaces it with good. When your brain knows you're with someone you can trust, it is free to care for the big stuff - it doesn't waste itself in the fight or flight stuff that can otherwise consume it.
So what do we do with this? Being single or in a bad relationship, it would seem, is really bad for your health! It is not a happy stasis for human beings - our brain is searching, scanning, interviewing - looking for missing pieces, what it needs to be well and whole so it can go about the business of higher thinking, "A wedded heart changes everything, even the brain." I'm thinking the old adage, "Behind every great man, is a great woman," was truer than we knew. If the great man has a great woman under his skin and fingernails and draws on her strengths, his brain in an "idyll of safety", it is free to conquer the world. The same obviously holds true for the potential of the great woman - with her man's fluids in her, she is somehow better equipped.
I am sad today. Feeling like a hamster on a treadmill. Ah...hamsters. Someday I'll tell you how, as a teen, I ended up with 60-70 of them. I was a hamster lady - even took them to college with me. When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I even dreamed that she was born a hamster and I dreamed of the challenge of breastfeeding the little thing with the tiny little mouth - my nipple was as big as its head. I write a lot about the brain these days because I'm really struggling with mine. I would like to master my thinking. Intellectually, I know exactly what I need to think and do to be happy, and what I need to leave behind. And yet, my stupid brain is in cahoots with my imbecile heart. If my heart were a chicken, it would the one running around the farmyard with no head. I get it. I have read everything I can get my hands on. I listen to friends. I wait for time to pass. Nothing helps. And so, I read articles about the brain, hoping for a way to master it, trick it, smoke and mirror it, sleight of hand it. I have offered it substitutes, gotten busy to exhaust it, transported it to other worlds with fiction, tried to smile and laugh it to confusion. Nothing works. Not a day goes by.
Your challenge today is reading that article - be astounded and convinced that your wellness is predicated on having relationships that give your brain safe harbor. If you are not in a relationship that floods you with positive endorphins, think about getting out. You deserve and apparently NEED to be loved and cherished. Your health and longevity is tied to it.
Peace,
Sarah
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