As I arrive at my quarter of a century birthday, I realize many large choices are dawning upon me. I joke with Ryan that weddings are overly abundant at our age. Ryan chortles. He has attended over seven or more weddings just this year. I am a child of a great romance with a less-than-perfect divorce. I feel confident in my ability to one day spontaneously elope with only a cute boy, balding judge, amateur photographer enthusiast, and an awesome massive dress. I am confident I will feel no remorse about the traditional wedding ceremony that never will be and never was dreamt about to begin with. I am fine living vicariously through the beautiful weddings my friends have had or will have. I think other people's celebrations are often more fun than my own. There is no stress associated. I hate to be the center of a huge occasion.

I watch friends marry, move across the world, chase their succulent dreams and I marvel at their incredible decision making skills. Perhaps I was ill the day decision making skills was taught. I understand the valuable notion of context clues and I love love love being the encourager in a group. But decision making is not a strong point and often I make them with my eyes squeezed tight. These larger decisions cloud over me. I cannot blindly make them anymore. And when I stop to think about them, I mean really think about them, I am often shunned. I hate the following statements:

"You think too much." I really don't have a choice.

"You will just know when things are right" which inherently means things are currently just wrong. Which is wrong.

"Things will all work themselves out in the end." Which may be true but isn't comforting because I still have to suffer through the means to get to the end.

If there is one thing that I am freakishly skilled at it is sensing my own body. I can point to where the nasal congestion is located in my face, I can visualize the inner workings of organs, headaches, and cramps, and I especially am in tune with my gut. This is one thing I am learning, Grasshopper. The gut- the very root of my body- knows exactly what to do when making a decision. It is my wandering mind and the pressure from people around me that make things so complicated.

What I love about the human body is the interlocked parts of our systems that makes us so much more than machines. The way circuits cross over each other, double checking and rechecking what is imporatant. It is fascinating how the body reacts to a stimulus in one part of the brain and five feet away, in another part of the body, is another reaction. When I become incredibly stressed, my shin explodes. Literally. It is unexplained and very painful but that is the way my body deals with stress. I wonder how many other undetected interwoven systems run through our bodies. Specifically, I wonder about the gut reaction. The organic feeling that something just isn't right or that something just has to happen a certain way. Or else. I have not explored scientific literature to see if an actual gut feeling exists or has been proven. One day I may search the stacks. But one study does come to mind that I will share.

There is a population of people who do not believe that the left side of the world exists. Any object they focus on, including their own body, does not have a left side. Most of the time these are people who have endured a stroke to the right side of the brain. It is only the right side of their body in which they have sensation and feeling. In which they believe exists. These people forget to dress the left side of their body. They only eat the food on the right side of their plate. Asking them to look left makes them nauseous and ill. It physically hurts and it is scary because the left side of the world does not exist anymore. Would you jump into a dark, empty abyss if you believed there was nothing to catch you? It is so completely beyond us to understand their world. I cannot even fathom.

A famous study was done with people who exhibited left neglect. Each person was asked to look at a picture of two houses. The right side of both houses was identical- pleasant places you could imagine your grandparents residing. The left side of the houses, however, was different. One house remained calm and pleasant. The other house was set ablaze with flames piping from the roof.

When asked what house a person with left neglect prefered, the person always responded "I don't know. They are both the same" because their physical vision only saw the pleasant side of each the house. The researcher pushed the person for an answer: "It doesn't matter. Just pick the one that you would prefer to be in right now." Amazingly, although the person with left neglect could not physically see the flames, they almost always chose the house not on fire.

Perception, the integration of physical vision and it's representation on the brain, is more than what we physically see with our eyeballs. It is the mixing and mingling of a million neuro gobblygook- visual sensations, electrical synapses, and meaningful processes to name a few. I am not proposing that maybe there is this invisible side of life that none of us see. But I am curious as to why a significant amount of people chose the safe, calm house when they could not see the flames of the other.


I believe that sometimes we don't necessarily need to see something to know that something is wrong, something is just right, etc. We say that our gut had this feeling and we either chose to follow it or we didn't. I'm learning to trust the gut and to be honest, it rarely lets me down. As for huge choices... well I'm still in graduate school in a space that I love dearly. I will watch and learn and hopefully by next winter, my place in the real world will be clearer. And maybe then I will just know that things are right.