Do You Mind?

Every once in a while I'm able to get enough distance from a scientific reality to really appreciate it and be amazed by it. It's like this pregnancy -- I understand biologically how it works, but honestly, think about: there are these two random things in these two random (well, hopefully not random) people that come together in this weird way and then, where there was nothing, a PERSON begins to exist, grows all the functions (hopefully) necessary for life, and then comes out. It's insane.

I often have this same sort of reaction to the way people's brains work. When you really get a sense of how we all process information, it's pretty amazing to recognize the diversity (to use a cliched term) of each person's creative process. For example, I'm a writer. There are so many times in a given day that I see something, say something, experience something, and my mind begins to craft it into a story, an essay, a blog post. Whatever. I'm not much of an art person (as far as being able to create visual art, I mean), but today I had two moments where I was just dying for a camera. Lucy was chasing this one bunny through the park, and at one point she found it and stuck her head through a low fence around the flowers (put there, in fact, to keep dogs out). This bunny was just a few feet away, enjoying a salad, staring back at Lucy, who was calm enough to just stand there and stare back. I wished -- oh, how I wished -- I'd had a camera to capture that picture. Even that, though, is a story that I just could've told through a different medium.

Wes's brain, of course, works very differently. He's a bit of a writer, too, but it's much less packaged than the kind of writing I like to do. It's informational. It's straightforward. It's more analysis and less emotion. And yet there's no doubt that his brain amazes me, too. He knows so much (one of the things that excites me about having kids is that they'll have this dad who knows the most random and wonderful things). Two nights ago, we read to the baby about Robert the Bruce. Who on earth is Robert the Bruce, you might ask? But not Wes. He knew who they guy was. What on earth? Why? For what reason would Wes have learned about this fairly minor historical figure and retained the information all these years. And just think about what his brain does everyday at work in a job that is highly diagnostic. It's all of WebMD but in his head.

We have a friend (the fiance of a friend, who by virtue of that relationship, has become a friend) who does work in film. I can only imagine how his brain works, putting together scripts, video, stills, music, editing and more to create what might only be a 10-15 minute film. I cannot even begin to fathom how his mind works to get from nothing to those 15 minutes. It's crazy.

So how does your mind work? How do you see the world? What is your lens? How do you process?