Right Brain-Left Brain-Right Brain

I feel like a divided person. My counselor says that both sides of my brain are quite strong and that she understands how that could be confusing to reconcile. I realized last week that although I feel exceptionally secure in my ability to reason and succeed in school, that I feel insecure about others' capacity to love me and my prospects for a happy marriage. I'd never realized that part of me could be insecure because the confidant part overshadowed the fragile side. If I listen to reason and recall my resume it seems logically apparent that my life is great.

I looked up a table to remind myself which side of the brain was associated with which ways of being.

Let me express the ways in in which my two sides of my brain are fighting with each other. It's an inquiry into scientific thought, spirits and God.

For most of my life I've been agnostic. I've thought the idea of God was nice and that Jesus had helpful teachings but I had no idea where faith could come from. When my cousin was in a coma when I was 7 my parents told me to pray for him so he could live again outside the hospital. He died. I decided that prayers didn't work very well. They didn't make sense like math and grammar did.

Yet, in the past two months, again and again I've been confronted with probabilities that point to the notion that we can communicate with people on the other side. Previously, I just assumed that being dead was like being in a dark, silent box with no thoughts, no inputs, no anything.  And now, even my mathematical, logical scientific side isn't so sure.

Johanna's talking to us
 
It seems more likely that Johanna is communicating with the world than that a variety of people have received remarkably coherent, insightful messages from her about real concrete facts that they shouldn't have known about. How would the medium know how she died, that she was abused, that she had a German Shepard, that her step-son was in trouble, that people made t-shirts for her memorial run in California? How would two people, at the same time, hear Johanna talking to them the night she died? They didn't even know she was dead yet. Why did she know her husband for precisely 2000 days? Why did she tell people that she knew she would die young as an explanation for why she'd marry the love of her life who happened to be 23 years older than her?

I became open to the idea that Johanna was talking to the world and that she heard us talking to her. I started hugging the empty space in the last place I saw her alive (my office the week before she died on a random visit).

When her husband confided in me that he wanted to kill himself I cried out to her in the shower and begged her to tell me what to do. I saw the door move. My boyfriend insists it must be the air conditioning, but I couldn't ever get it to move again no matter what I did.

This next thing might be TMI, but I got the first UTI of my life, and was using a bathroom I'd never normally go to out of desperation. On the wall of the stall it said

"You is smart."
"You is kind."
"You is important."

The nanny in the book The Help told this to the mistreated and neglected white child she cared for in the hopes she would remember that someone loved her. It made me take note. I found another message in the stall. "Ask for help when you need it." And so I did ask for help and the burden of dealing with Johanna's husband's suicidal thoughts was lifted from me and he wasn't too mad that I told someone else. This is proof of nothing, but my intuitive, emotional side wondered about all of these messages.

My beloved Nanny is telling me she loves me?
After my mind had been opened to the concept of communication from the other side, my counselor asked me if I had a picture of me from when I was a child. "My mom has all of them" I replied.
The next day I was blogging and wishing that my nanny Veronica was still alive because she was absolutely the best commenter. She read the pages of depressing posts from my first year teaching and was full of advice and wisdom. When I reread her posts after she died I realized how much she loved me and that I'd never noticed.

A bit later my roommate walks in with a letter from Veronica's husband. I was confused. I'd written him a "I'm sorry your wife died" card, but lost it for four months and had been too embarrassed to send it without rewriting it. My roommate admitted she'd seen it and thrown it in the mail without asking. She had no way to know what it was.

The letter from her husband told me how much Veronica loved me and had two CD's in it. The first was photos from her life and had pictures of me as a little child in her arms. The song playing next to the pictures was "I hope you dance." I'd painted the song's lyrics "I hope you always feel small beside the ocean" into my painting the week before to remind me that at the very least the ocean was a higher power. I'd even changed it to my favorite quote on facebook the day before.  The rest of the song reminds people to "give faith a fighting chance." The second CD was 6 pictures she'd had in her wallet until she died. They were of me and my brother. She'd loved me, the girl she only knew until I was four,  for her entire life. My request had been answered. I had a photo of myself and a reminder that even though she couldn't add comments to my blog she was still here. Whether or not this was all a coincidence I noticed because of my quest for meaning and love or really a grand plan orchestrated by her I KNEW that she loved me and that I would always have that.

If dead people can communicate, maybe God exists too?

Although I had no particular reason to believe in God, I started to realize that the world couldn't all be described with mathematical truths. I know that scientists would argue that I'm looking for coincidences but I didn't feel like everything I just shared was a coincidence. My left brain and right brain advance different arguments and I can believe each of them.

On a bike ride in on the road I frequented often in Las Vegas, I found myself riding with a pro-racer who was doing a sprint workout. I LOVE sprints and even though I'm not as fit as her I knew I had a few advantages such as a predisposition to sprinting and more weight to carry me down the slightly inclined road. My bike racer, competitive instinct kicked in. I started sprinting and accelerated to at least 30 miles per hour. The moment my ego was happy that I'd come around the pro my chain dropped suddenly. My knees flew into my handlebars and my bike lurched wildly. I just let go of my mind, held on, and I didn't crash. I couldn't understand why I hadn't gone down or analyze what I'd done in that moment.  I couldn't understand why the bike I've ridden for 30,000 miles suddenly failed to hold my sprint. My only injury was two bruise marks where my knees hit the handlebars. I was in front of the pro-racer when my chain dropped and would have seriously screwed up her first season as a pro and my own body if I'd gone down. At that moment I sat up and thought: "Okay, I'm done. I won't race her. I get the message. You didn't want to hurt me but you wanted me to let racing go."

After the ride I sent a message to my friend saying "I think God is trying to communicate with me" and I started off on a hike out into the middle of Red Rocks. I left the beaten trail and climbed up and down random gullies, unsure if I'd need to backtrack or could complete the circle I was attempting. I started worrying about missing the wedding  I'd traveled to Vegas to attend and a bit about my personal safety and about how no one knew where I was. And after a long descent into a gully I hoped wouldn't end at a dead end cliff,  I realized where I was and saw the path back to my car and started to think about God and my friend. Within a minute of that thought I found an angel carved into the rocks. The carving had obviously taken weeks to produce and I can't remember seeing anything of the sort in all my years playing on rocks.

I KNOW the mathematical arguments explaining why we find so many coincidences in our life. I know that I experience thousands of events each day and that I'm evolutionary programmed to seek patterns. I realize I forget all of the facts that don't support my theories and only focus on the strange events-like the fact that my boyfriend visited my favorite college roommate in Turkey because he used to date the only other rock-climbing math major from my 1400 person undergrad college. And he met her in Austin and me in Phoenix-it's not as if we were still connected by geography.

However, the only day of my life where I have ever suggested that God was talking to me is the day that the moment I wonder about God I find an angel carved into a rock at the end of a random, off-trail hike. Who motivated me to hike down the wash I chose when dozens were possible?

Even the skeptical mathematician in me is shaken. I drive home from the two weddings in Vegas thinking about all of the people I visited that weekend and have a shocking realization. Three years ago someone stood up to sprint in front of me and unclipped from their pedal and crashed. I ran into him at 25 miles per hour, flipped over my handlebars and broke his vertebrae. This was exactly the injury my father inflicted upon my mother. Not only had I also broken someone's back, but I screamed at that 15 year old boy for being so stupid as to crash in front of me. I ignored that I was jealous and mad that my rival had won the race while I got checked by a EMT. I was mad that the injuries from that crash that never fully healed and kept me from bike racing.

If I had been so jealous, so mean and had accidentally broken a teenager's back and still forgiven myself, maybe I could forgive my father too. He probably didn't intend to break my mom's back when he kicked her. He probably felt bad about it. We both had negative emotions influencing the outcome of the situation. I don't see my mistake on the same level as my father's even though the physical outcome was the same. But I started to think that perhaps I could forgive him someday and started crying. How could that horrible bike crash be the key to starting to forgive my father? How strange was it that I was the only one I know who has broken someone's back on a bicycle? What were the chances that my agile mother would fall down the stairs, break her back again, and get the MRI that revealed her injury to be the same as the teenager's I ran into? Life felt a little too connected in my left brain. My right brain argued later-you've been looking for meaning and you connected some dots out of the millions of experiences from your life.

While I was crying at the realization that seemed an answer to my confusion about how to forgive my father a song came on the Christian radio station I'd flipped to on my drive home. It spoke to me. It was about a girl alone in her room who realized later in life that God had been with her even when she didn't know he was there. Britt Nicole began the song and it was my story too:

I remember the moment
I remember the pain
I was only a girl
But I grew up that day
Tears were falling
I know You saw me

Hiding there in my bedroom
So alone
I was doing my best
Trying to be strong
No one to turn to
That's when I met You

My math education brain says, "of course you are assimilating the lyrics to your experience." My emotions thought, wow, this sounds like a description of the day my dad broke my mother's back.

 And then she sang this:

I hear these people asking me
How do I know what I believe?
Well I'm not the same me
And that's all the proof I need
I felt love, I felt Your grace
You stole my heart that day. 

I went home, looked up the song and realized that Britt wrote it about her parents divorced that happened when she was seven. Mine divorced when I was eight, but I was seven the day the marriage truly ended for my mother. It took my mom awhile to leave after the beating because she had emergency neck surgery and was in no position to buy a new house. 

And with no proof, with no logic, no right brain, I felt loved. My heart that feels tight and bruised and closed off to the world felt open. I realized that my friends loved me and my family loved me and my dead friends loved me and GOD loved me. And I lay in bed with this amazing feeling of light and I wasn't the same me because I felt the grace. 

And then I told my office mate, who is a brilliant statistician and a very nice guy, and he handed me a book which offered mathematical rebuttals of all arguments for God and the feeling of love was replaced with the right brain-left brain war. My emotions believe that all of those messages were meant for me-the universe is filled with some strange, interconnected love that I don't quite understand and I asked for love and received it.  My right brain knows that I'm looking for these things and that I've always been good at finding connections in huge swaths of qualitative data. 

I ordered two books by John Polkinghorne and started reading about how Science and Theology are not mutually exclusive. They are both a quest for truth and answers. Theology is best suited to posit meanings for life and science is well suited to modeling the physical and social world. Polkinghorne is a brilliant mathematical physicist turned Angelican priest and I was comforted that his arguments for God stood up against my advanced mathematical training. He doesn't suggest there is proof of God, because he knows what that word really means. He suggests that the alternative explanations for the fine-tuning of the Universe that is needed to allow life carbon based life are not more understandable or logical. I'm resting easier knowing that someone can believe in God and Science and see them as rational quests for answers to different questions.

I decided that I might as well talk to whatever loving being might have had a part in orchestrating my universe. Since logic doesn't dictate what to believe, I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with the positive emotions I feel when I imagine that I'm not alone and someone loves me. Even in mathematics there are are undecidable theorems. I understand how mathematicians prove that the continuum hypothesis cannot be proven true or false. We just get to decide and live life according to our choice.