Sometimes 1+1 = 64

I’ve been reading Whole Brain Living (not an affiliate link, just a recommendation) and it has honestly been one of the most helpful resources in understanding the twists and turns of why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made in the past, why certain parts of me have been so at odds, why it sometimes feels like someone else made some critical decisions for me even though I remember consciously making those decisions myself.

Something our society likes to push on us is the idea that everything is linear and logical. 1+1 is always going to equal 2. If there is a positive outcome, then it was the result of good planning and sound, logical reasoning. If a poor outcome happened, it was the opposite. There is the assumption that someone will only choose something because they have fully thought it through and truly want it. That if you just think hard enough through a problem, you’ll always find a solution.

Can I just say this is all a lot of hot garbage?

Because the only thing in life that is purely linear and logical in this sense is a math equation. Most things in life, particularly the decisions we make, are heavily influenced by a number of factors that are far from what we consider logical. There is societal conditioning. There are our underlying emotions. There are survival mechanisms we learn as children that don’t serve us as adults. There are all of these things in the people we’re interacting with. And of course, there is just the sheer randomness of the universe and the fact that nothing is guaranteed in life even if you check off everything on your to do list and approach everything in a calm and reasonable manner.

What I’ve been realizing as I’ve been reading Whole Brain Living is that many of the choices I’ve made in my life have been heavily influenced by societal conditioning and extreme fear. Those live in my left emotional brain and keep me in a fight/flight/fawn state a large part of the time. As a result my left logical brain has swooped in on many occasions to protect this scared inner child of mine. Somewhere along the line, it decided that the most effective way to protect my left emotional brain was to just bury my right brain (particularly my right emotional brain) as deep as possible and bully it into silence so I could make “purely logical decisions.” And that has led to extreme inner conflict between my right brain trying to tell me I’m not on the right path and my left logical brain stuffing its fingers in my ears and pushing me further down a path that makes me miserable.

This inner conflict has been why it is so hard to motivate myself to do the things that would logically make sense if I was looking to climb up the career ladder. Because I’m constantly fighting my right brain to accomplish those things.

So the question is, would it have been better to pursue my “illogical” dreams that might have made me happy rather choose than the “logical” option that promised safety and security?

I think this is the wrong question entirely because it assumes we can only choose one way of being. We should only be right- OR left-brained, and we should only focus on logic OR emotion.

The truth is our brains are made up of four quadrants: left logical, left emotional, right emotional, and right logical. Trying to just choose one is what gets us in trouble because the other parts of our brain don’t just shut off. They all want to be heard and part of the decision making process. When we ignore one or multiple quadrants, we end up developing mental distress and potentially physical issues (see the book When the Body Says No for more on that).

In reality, what makes us most successful (in the sense that we feel most aligned with our decisions, even if we don’t “succeed” at the task) is when we have all the different parts of our brain work together to make a decision. Including the right logical brain.

This is a part of ourselves we overlook quite frequently because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make “logical” sense. Our left logical brain is focused on a linear timeline, on the material things we can tangibly hold or count, on keeping us physically safe. We can easily comprehend this. Our right logical brain, on the other hand, is essentially our connection to everything in the universe. It prioritizes the good of everyone, is omniscient and circular, and it’s more about how something feels than being able to explain how you came to a certain decision.

In other words, left-brained logic means 1+1 always equals 2. But in right-brained logic, 1+1 might equal 64. And no matter how much we push and struggle and try to make it come out to 2, it comes out 64. It seems horribly wrong. But somewhere in the great cosmos, it makes perfect sense because of a million different variables we didn’t even know existed. Sometimes predictable machines malfunction and something unexpected happens.

Speaking for myself, I tend to cling to left-brained logic because I like to have a guide telling me that I’m “doing it right,” that I’m in control, that things will happen predictably. Right-brained logic is so much harder to trust because there isn’t really “right” or “wrong,” I have to let go of control and still trust that everything will be okay, and things could be highly unpredictable. It requires a much greater sense of trust in something we can’t prove exists other than a feeling we have when we’re truly present. And yet, the more I lean into my right brain, the more “right” things feel.

That doesn’t mean we should throw left-brained logic entirely out the window. As I said, we need all parts of our brain to make decisions together. What it does mean, though, is asking your left logical brain to let others have a turn speaking and to be open to what they have to say. Even if what they’re saying means 1+1 = 64. Because sometimes 64, though unexpected, could actually be the very place you need to be if you can just let go of believing that it’s supposed to be 2.