Metaphor du jour
One of the reasons I love writing an advice column is because I do my best thinking not in a solitary state of meditation, but in response to other people. And here’s a non-advice-related example. A friend of mine e-mailed me a week or so ago to ask about the common distinction between left brain/right brain, and how much of that is actually based in science and how much is simply shorthand for analytical v. artsy-fartsy.
I gave him some basic 411 about the different brain hemispheres, and the corpus callosum, and handedness, and neural plasticity. Then I summed it up with this:
“I mean, sure, they’re different, but it’s like Manhattan v. Brooklyn. You can’t really imagine one without the other, and everything is constantly commuting between one and the other. Real estate’s a little cheaper in the right hemisphere, and the left hemisphere is more influential in the world of ideas and commerce, but fundamentally, it’s two halves of a whole.”
I gotta say, I’m fairly proud of that one. And it sure beats the last metaphor I came up with for the difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
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While you can’t have one without the other….I know many people (myself included) who are fairly content to NEVER leave one or the other, and prefer that contact between the two parts is minimized.
I’m perfectly content to not visit the right half of my brain (as more often than not I’m confuzzled and exhausted when I do)…and when I was a Brooklynite I despised having to go to Manhattan.
So, the metaphor works even on an individual level!