Chia days

Last Thursday, I went to my writing class. Writing class puts me into a kind of parallel universe, and ideas begin to sprout from my brain as if my skull contains a well-spread chia pet. Chia brain. Like this one. Oh, the ideas!

On Friday evening and all day Saturday, I attended the in-class portion of The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Depression. Oh. My. Word. The ideas the ideas the ideas. So much amazing information. So much research being done.

If you have any interest at all in what's going on in the link between our emotions and our thoughts, a good place to start is with the PBS series This Emotional Life. And when they get to the part about what antidepressants do for the rebuilding of brain cells, here's an addendum you might want to know about. Exercise has been proven to have the same effect!!

And you know what else? I found out the reason so many writers talk about walking being good for writing. The left-right-left-right motion of the body integrates the two hemispheres of the brain! Walking, and other bilateral movement unifies the emotional and cognitive, the global and specific, the feeling and thinking. Memories join together with the reactions, and ideas surface with words sticking to them instead of just free form (and scary - or useless - or whatever).

And Sunday - yesterday - was a day I need to write about in my journal because in a few years, someone will say, "When did that happen?" and I will want to look it up. Some of it I wrote about at Thank You, Miss Percival. Some of it needs time to hatch. And some of it just needs to kept and pondered.

For these, and for reasons I cannot yet talk about, here is what I want to say. Gretchen Rubin is right. "The days are long, but the years are short."