Conversational
An excerpt from Narrative Heartbeat, 260305-000777
How many times do you think I can use the word “neurological” in a sentence?
In a minute? An hour? An afternoon?
It’s a lot. Gosh, we could count them over the course of a week. (It would be zillions.)
If I try to stop using the word neurological, what would happen?
I’d be at a significant deficit of being able to describe things I need to describe on a frequent ongoing basis, for sure.
And even more pressing… so many people I care about, so many people who are dear to me, people who are crucial to my survival, people I profoundly respect, people who do the most amazing community repair work I’ve ever seen… I feel like there would be no way for me to describe with real accuracy how important they are.
Without those words, I feel like there would be no way for me to tell you what they’re up against, and how innovative they are, and how needed their skills and lived expertise are in the world right now.
I have no idea how I could convey those things to you without using the word neurological over and over again.
Maybe somebody could do it. Maybe somebody’s out there somewhere doing it now.
But I haven’t yet thought of a way.
So I go back to this word again and again. Neurological.
What even is neurology?
And neurology — isn’t the title of this post.
But the title of this post… and the nature of neurology… have something very important in common.
Let’s see if I can say what that is.
Here’s my first try:
An exchange.
A conversational quality.
Sparking synapses.
The passing of information back and forth.
Movement, awareness, electricity.
Growing new pathways. Deepening and tending existing pathways.
How do we be here with one another, know one another better, learn from one another, bridge language with one another?
How do we find one another across distances?
…Across the disaster-dotted wasteland of technological exploitation that has separated us from one another with such lucrative extractivity?
How do we build with one another?
How do we discover ways to have enough of what we need to live…to be truly alive in our bodies, on this planet… to feel fulfilled, to feel awake, to feel vital and full of life energy?
Oh, we yearn for it.
Where is it? How do we reach it?
Where is that exchange of living electrical current? That exchange of nutrients?
Where do we experience being woven together in the social fabric, locating ourselves in patterns of interlocking strands that give us depth and context… rhythm and flow…
How do we get there?
I know some folks are sick of me repeating it ——
—— but all of that is neurology.
You and me and all of us, we’re made of it.
Neurology, and its conversational qualities.
We are becoming with every tiny increment of nutrient exchange and shared experience and evolving language.
We get to choose who and how we are becoming, individually and together.
It happens in conversation.