How can I not?

I was recently asked "how can you work here and ride a motorcycle?"  I suppose for that question to make sense, the context may be helpful.  The person who asked was most familiar with the fact that I work with people who are recovering from a Traumatic Brain Injury.  I also specialize in helping people cope with persistent pain.  This, of course, is not the first time this question has come my way, in some fashion or another.  And it left me thinking...

First, let me ask you, what do you love to do.  Do you love your job?  (Cheers! Me too.  We are among the lucky minority it would seem.)  Do you love caring for your children?  Do you love to ride a bicycle?  How about hiking?  Do you like road trips?  Driving to visit family?  Skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing?  What is it that you love to do?  What makes your life interesting, meaningful, and fun? 

Stop for a minute, and see if you can remember ever hearing about someone being injured doing these activities.  Because I have.  Almost everything I do in the course of the day before getting on and after getting off of my motorcycle, I have seen people endure pain or brain injury from.  What sort of life would it be if we asked people to stop caring for their homes because they might get hurt?  To stop spending time with their family?  To stop working?  That's preposterous, you might say.  But in every activity there is risk.  And if we let that risk stop us, we are living a life based in fear.

What if instead, we ask what makes you come alive?  How will you know that you have lived a life worth living?  What is your passion?  How do you know your life is in balance?  What if I asked you those questions, and helped you to build a life based on their answers?  What if we respected other peoples answers to those questions, even as they are different from our own? 

Like all of you, I am a complex person.  I love my partner beyond belief.  I love my kids in ways I cannot describe.  I can spend an evening chatting with friends and have no idea where the hours went.  I like to smile at babies in the grocery store, and pet other peoples dogs on hikes.  I love to talk with people, to understand what is meaningful to them, and to help them figure out how to pursue their best life.  I like going for walks and catching a surprise scent of roses, or discovering I am suddenly in the middle of a bog.  I love to snuggle into the couch with soft blankets, and fall asleep while my family watches TV, my puppy's curled behind my knees.  I love to camp, sitting around the campfire at night, drifting off to sleep unplugged from civilization, waking to the sun and the birds.  And I love to ride motorcycles. 

On this list, are motorcycles statistically more risky than the other activities?  Sure.  But the joy from each of those activities makes the others even more fulfilling.  Each of the passions I describe above shine a light of joy on the others, making the other activities that much better.  Take one out, the others shine less bright. Fear is also exponential.  If we remove an activity we want to do because of fear, we will also have more fear in the other activities we love.  Take out riding motorcycles, and suddenly we wonder if we are safe driving in a car to visit with friends.  And we notice the number of hikers that have fallen from trails this year.  And walking alone becomes riskier, because we may fall or be attacked.  Airplanes?  Statistically safer than driving, but hard to fathom.  Oh, that brings us to driving; one of the most dangerous activities most of us do on a daily basis. Nixed from the list. Suddenly, the risks are in focus, and nothing is safe. 

Our brain tends to follow a path.  A path of self confidence, curiousity, and optimism or of fear, distrust, and pessimism.  (or pick any path between these two extremes...)  We practice this neural pathway over and over and over.  And I choose to practice joy, optimism, freedom, and wonder.  Which leads me to anser the question "how can you ride a motorcycle?" with "How can I not?"

Why I loved Inside Out

Inside Out.... While it's a rare movie I can't wait to see, from the moment I saw the preview for Inside Out, I couldn't wait for its release. I was not disappointed; I laughed and cried and laughed and cried. My therapist heart sang.... Finally! As a society, we can talk about feelings! And in a fairly intelligent way! Our personality being made of distinct islands (tendencys) formed and colored by core memories? I'm on board with that. That memories are changed by the current context? Neurobiology says yes. While we sleep, our brain is discarding unused information to become more effecient? Excellent personification of a process we don't completely understand yet.

So what happens in this movie? I've seen an occassional review that complains 'nothing.' I suppose at its most basic level, the plot line is that a girl moves to San Francisco when her dad gets a job transfer. But rather than the plot, I see that as the setting in which the real story unfolds.

The real plot asks us 'what makes us human? What are our feelings? How do we develop emotionally? What is the meaning of family? Of struggle? Of change?  What is the difference between saddness and depression? What are the protective factors and risk factors for an emotion shifting into something beyond our coping skills?'

I suppose if you are looking for Hollywood's epic adventures with sex, violence, and explosions, this may not be the movie for you. And if you are expecting the movie industry to have resolved its gender, racial, and class biases all in one movie, it's not quite there.

However, Inside Out gives us all a way to conceptualize our sense of self in a way that is more complex than our standard conversations about self. "What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Weather, politics, sports talk, blah, blah, blah..." These fall back topics are not who we are.  This movie tackles how our memories affect both our current feeling, our mood, and our overarching sense of self.  This movie gives us a picture of how our that process is recripocal; whichever feeling is at the control panel can influence our perception of that memory. And this movie challenges the platitude 'don't be sad. You have so much to be happy about.' This movie shows us that our saddness (and the complexity of our emotional experience) is what lets us experience empathy, lets us sit alongside those who are struggling and to wittness their pain, and through that experience, gives them the ability to manage their emotions and continue moving forward.

And the movie captures all of this and more in scene after relatable scene. This movie connects us to our process of maturing, moving away from pure simplistic emotions, and to our understanding that most situations present mixed emotions, and that we have power over which parts of those experiences we focus on. This movie tackles expectations, and how they can get us into trouble. This movie tackles resiliance, and how in our early years, our family helps us form our resilience. And this movie tackles how it is the challenges in life that help us to grow into more fully developed individuals. This movie even lets parents off the hook to a healthy degree. The good foundation built by loving parents leaves a lot of room for missteps and mistakes, and those mistakes leave space to deepen the parent child bond.

Do I understand the critics frusturated with the lack of social progress displayed in our media? Sure. But to have a movie that gives us a language to talk about our feelings, memories, depression, family, core experiences, subconscious, dreams, empathy, and the formation of self being dependent on both our experiences and our perception and interpretation of those experiences for me overshadows the pieces Pixar missed the mark on. I hope that in the discussions I have, those other cultural elements will figure in and help me to better understand other people's experiences. But that will only add to the wonder that is Inside Out.

This blog will now return to your previously identified topic of motorcycles. Please forgive this interruption.