Brain & Pain

I feel like I shouldn't even blog today because it is going to be all over the place with absolutely no point so feel free to exit now.

Coffee is seriously a drug. I never use to drink coffee, but then I moved to New Zealand and everyone was like 'oh you have to try the flat white.' Of course, I gave it a go. Now I try to limit myself to maybe 2 cups of coffee a week, I know that's no type of addiction, but if you've ever seen the things coffee does to me, it's insane. I'll have one cup of coffee and then go to the library and check out 5 books usually one along the lines of health and fitness, one on essential oils, one mystery novel, one comic, and one about stocks. After the coffee wears off I never open the books. I have no desire to read the books I checkout, but as soon as I have coffee I'm all up into it.

So I could continue on my coffee rant, but I was actually writing all of that yesterday and then stopped so it's going to have to end there for now as my train of thought is in a totally different space now.

Today, I've been thinking a lot about us as humans. In particular the brain, pain, and connections. It's so crazy to think about the way we operate. Even more insane to think of us as only a brain. You can break an arm, the bone will heal. Get your leg amputated, harder to walk, but there are ways that still enable you to walk and move around. Cut a finger off, eh you'll be fine, you can still find other ways to get the job done. Break your back, a bit more unfortunate, but you can still move around and communicate. The heart is pretty vital, but if given enough time you can get a heart transplant. Take away your oxygen, killing your brain, you're screwed. One part of our body that controls everything! The more I think about it, the more I am amused that we don't suffer headaches on the daily. One thing, that controls everything. The way we walk, the way we talk, the way we think, the way we eat, the way we type, everything! Like holllyyyy smokkes, just imagine how fast those connections are working right at this very second for me to be able to produce a thought and find the right keys to type it, all while softly mouthing everything I am typing. I wonder if I'm mouthing what I'm writing because it is a way for me to process what is actually going on or if it's just a way of keeping on track about what I am writing. I think it is a way to keep me on track because I'm not really mouthing it until I actually type it and see it, so I guess in that aspect my hands are trying to keep up with my brain and my lips are just trying to follow along even though there is a bit of a lapse. If that didn't just put in perspective how fast the brain works than I don't know what will.

Not to mention, like stated in a previous post about how many thoughts we actually have a day. On average, a person has around 70,000 thoughts a day. I'm not even sure when that research was done, but I would be interested to know because I feel as if we would have even more thoughts in today's generation compared to the last. I say this because of the emergence of technology and social media. They say that are brain is currently trying to rewire itself because we have so many forms and ways of taking in information that we are not use to having to mentally file everything that we are learning and seeing. Think about our great grandparents who use to have the news and the newspaper, that was it. Whatever didn't get reported in the news or newspaper, they weren't really aware of it. Today we have the news, newspaper, online databases, social media, heaps and heaps of ways of obtaining information. All of this information trying to cram into that one brain that controls our entire body.

If it is our brain that is running the show then why are we so hooked on what a person looks like, instead of who they actually are. They say we make our first judgements of a person within milliseconds of meeting them, but what they look like really doesn't have anything to do with who they are. I guess you could start to see what they value by their appearance, weight, clothing, and etcetera, but why are we not more interested in why they think that way. If someone wants to wear all black, why do they want to wear all black? If a girl doesn't want to shave, find out why she doesn't want to shave. There's got to be reasoning behind all of this, whether the person recognizes it or not is a completely different story. There are lots of things we do without necessarily thinking why we do it or we do it out of habit to the point if we were asked about it, we may not know. Clothes don't control a person, hair doesn't control a person, weight doesn't control a person, a brain controls a person. Get curious, ask more questions, find out what it is that makes them that way. You could have two identical people wearing the exact same thing, but the likelihood of their reasoning behind why they are the way they are is likely to be very different so who are we to judge them all the same.

I'll just briefly touch on pain and connections since I have already made this pretty long and then if I am still thinking about it another day I will go into more detail.

Connections and people. One of my friends today while eating lunch at work was telling about a Ted talk they had watched and we started talking about how people crave connections with one another. This really made me start thinking about the connections I make, the connections I invest in, the connections I value, how much time I put into connections, and other variables. After reflecting on all of my thoughts, I feel as if that's where we as humans confuse one another. All of our perceptions of connections are going to be different and that's where the error occurs. What I mean by that is that there are some people that I believe I have a very strong connection with. Some of these strong connections are with people I talk to nearly everyday such as my sister, mom, and dad. There are some people I have very strong connections with that I talk to maybe once a month like some of my best friends from back home. To me, these connections are very strong however talking to someone everyday is quite different than talking to them once a month. It is possible that one of my best friends from back home may feel upset or not as strong of a connection since we don't have everyday banter. Next thing you know, they may not value the friendship because they feel as if I have not put time into our friendship, meanwhile I'm over here thinking everything is good as gold. Every connection is different, remember that your perception can only be true for yourself. It is important for us to have those conversations with our friends and family (especially those that we believe to be strong) to make sure you are on the same page with another. Too often as humans we assume and a lot of communication is lost through the translation.

Pain. The only reason I thought of pain today is because I went to the gym for the first time in ages and I always like going into the steam room when I am done working out. I was the only one in there and I watched a man come inside and sit down right next to the steam vent. The steam had just started coming out so for about the first 30 seconds he was fine. After that, this man was losing it. He was rocking back and forth, running his hands through his hair, breathing deep. I mean it just seemed like this man was dying. For awhile I thought he was just extremely irritated and was too scared to scoot closer to me and away from the vent, but then he looks up to me and says something along the lines of it's way to hot in here and they need the steam to stop once it hits a certain temperature. I agreed, but the entire time I was sitting there thinking to myself, 'what makes us sit through the pain?' Why do we chose to sit there and physically burn? What part of pain in pleasureful? This can be applicable to physical pain or mental and emotional pain. Sometimes pain is inevitable and we may not see it coming, but how often do we put ourselves in painful situations and just sit there and take it? There is good pain, but how much pain do we experience that isn't healthy and is avoidable.

Just a little (or a lot) of food for thought for today.

[See if you can spot the pain in the picture above]