Left Brain, Right Brain

Seriously, someone should have seen it coming.

When I was a kid – I can remember this going back to high school, but I’m sure it started before that, actually – I used to try to rearrange my room on a regular basis.  I used to rearrange the furniture, although there were only so many ways to position the pieces in my room, so that didn’t get me too far.  But I would rearrange the posters and pictures in my room.  I would clean the walls to get the Fun-Tak off and with some hope that maybe, just maybe, the Fantastik spray cleaner would take the holes out of the walls from the thumb tacks and miraculously make the wall whole again.  I would take everything down, clean, then put it all back up in some different, new, and, at the time, more appealing order and arrangement.

The writing, therefore, was literally on the wall.  I should have known that, at some point in my life, I would want to be a designer or organizer or decorator or something of that ilk.  I did this in my college room, too, although not as much, considering I had a lot of beer to drink.

I went to law school.  I became a lawyer.  I considered how to rearrange my office on days that the stress really got to me.

I became a legal writing professor.  I love teaching.  On the days that I am stressed and I can’t focus on what to do next, or when I am procrastinating when I need to grade papers, I rearrange and clean and organize my office or home.

Which begs the question – is the cleaning, organizing, decorating merely an escape, or really my true interest?

I know that, now, when I am not working during the summer, I go back to those interests.  I clean.  I decorate.  I paint.  I organize and reorganize.  I usually garden (although not this summer).  I am on summer vacation and this is always how I spend it.  And that makes me happy.

I actually think that it has more to do with balancing my brain.  I am so very right-brained from mid-August through April that, when summer break rolls around (or, for that matter, any break - I painted my kitchen over spring break, for example), my left-brained creative self takes over.  Or maybe I’m left-brained and was raised to be totally right-brained (like those left-handed kids who were forced to be right-handed) and now my brain is saying “oh no you didn’t.”

Either way, I clearly crave that balance.  That's why, when the right brain is overloaded, the left brain comes to the rescue.  I am totally digging my left-brained existence right now, even though the right brain is working alongside it.  It's all about balance.

As always, thank you for stopping by.