PIANO PIANO

Snow flurries this evening. And a bit of powder on the ground. Not enough to get street cleaning cancelled though. And that's what we urban car owners long for, the cancellation of alternate side parking.

Love this from Buddha's Brain

The Challenges of Maintaining an Equilibrium

(How often is our less staid days were we admonished by our similarly addled friends, "Maintain, man! Just maintain!")

   For you to stay healthy, each system in your body and mind must balance two conflicting needs. On the one hand, it must remain open to inputs during ongoing transactions with its local environment; closed systems are dead systems.  On the other hand, each system must also preserve a fundamental stability centered around a good set-point and within certain ranges—not too hot, nor too cold. ...

Damn straight. This is the challenge of we adhd-ers. And maybe lots of humans who aren't so afflicted. The balance between focus and indirection. Pretty much what Jane Hirschfield said early on in this blog about balancing those two. You need to keep open for inspiration and closed for distractions from the path/task.

Of course, this isn't easy.

I will say that I am gaining confidence in my ability to accomplish things. I was watching an interview with the director of I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino, where he talks about getting his film made, piano piano, slowly, slowly. I like that. Piano piano. 

GETTING INTO SHAPE?

I mentioned awhile back that besides Buddha's Brain, I am reading (albeit quite slowly—I think I have had this book out of the Brooklyn Public Library since June), 101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory.

"...If memories are automatically sculpted, interwoven, and made to fit into prior categories even as they are being encoded, they are likely to be intermingled—sometimes wrongly—when being recalled It would seem to be a de facto molecular explanation for human stereotyping and an insight into the power of narrative on the human imagination. Narrative is a form of categorization, taking a nearly random set of experiences and shaping them into coherence. Such coherence may be true or false; it may also be inevitable. This notion is more postmodern than postmodernism. We automatically try to fit our experiences into the shape of the world we've already built inside our heads."

Gosh, you mean we might automatically make assumptions and not pay attention because we are hard-wired for processing information the same way?

But, because the brain is plastic, and we can learn new things, we don't HAVE to do this. If we try, or THINK about stuff, we can ... gulp ...  re-program.

I extrapolate that out to: we can change.

Maybe we will find the biochemical basis for transcendence and redemption?