Five years ago I left my job as a financial analyst to pursue higher education. I decided I wanted to work toward a PhD in Neuroscience. How I came about this is beyond me. What I did know is that my interest in the body-mind drove me. I had an innocent curiosity.
I studied business as an undergrad, so I had no former education or background in any kind of science. Before jumping into the deep end I thought it was a good idea to sample the neuroscience world. I heard about the grueling years that a PhD brings and wasn’t so sure I was ready to sign my life away to scientific research.
I tried something I’d only heard about in idealistic autobiographical tales. I thought, “I’ll just go to the professors of the PhD programs I’m interested in and ask them if I can sit in on their classes!”
For a couple months I reached out to professors and eventually, I was sitting in Dr. Heather Bimonte Nelson’s office. She is a prestiged researcher in the field of Behavioral Neuroscience investigating memory and aging.
I guess she saw something in me that day. I ended up working in her lab and through her connecting to several other professors. She was a doorway for me into this new world.
For a year I “audited” (i.e. sat in on classes without paying tuition) several Masters/PhD level classes including the likes of Psychopharmacology, Stress Neurobiology, and Neuroendocrinology. While simultaneously working in a high-level neuroscience lab studying the effects of hormones on the brain.
I was quickly learning about peptides and steroids, the hippocampus and amygdala, cortisol, transporters, enzymes, and receptors, G-proteins, agonist and antagonist drugs, epigenetics, histones and DNA Methylation, and lots more about how the nervous system wires itself. All of which I have undoubtedly forgotten in the past five years. But I loved every second when I was immersed in the learning.
After a year of plunging into the depths of this topic, I decided the PhD path was not for me. From what I saw, there was too much bureaucracy. Too little freedom to explore everything that I was interested in. Narrowing down to one field within Neuroscience felt impossible. Moreover, I was simply curious. You need more than curiosity to go into a doctorate program.
Following What Calls Us
Looking back, this year of my life feels so random. It seems like I was possessed by something to take on such a journey. However, I’ve lived this way for most of my life. I follow what I’m interested in until it’s no longer interesting. I follow resonance.
We all do this. Everything we are attracted to is based on resonance. Something outside communicating with something inside. If we look close enough we can find that they are not two separate things.
The challenge for me has been that our society is built around specialization. It constantly echos that being skilled at one thing is better than having a wider and more diverse skillset. I find this inhibits the individual’s creativity because we cannot necessarily control what we are attracted to.
So we may be studying to become a lawyer and suddenly fall in love with dance. Then there’s a conflict. We have to choose to pursue one path sacrificing time and attention for the other. This is fine, we can’t have it all.
But what’s saddening is that our structures are built in a way that the choice is not always made from the level of attraction. We’re influenced to choose based on how the resources (money, status, belonging, etc.) we receive from each, stack up against each other. We make it an intellectual process — pros and cons — which is only a fraction of the tools we have to make decisions.
We slowly lose childlike curiosity through our constant intellectualization. Trained out of this playfulness, we are less open to seeking paths that we are simply interested in and follow the “stable” ones.
We then choose to explore topics “in order to…” rather than doing it because it feels right. The belief that we must have a worthy outcome from our endeavors is crystallized in our society. We feel we are wasting our time otherwise. This limits the potential of what can come through us.
We think it’s normal to have to be doing something in order to get somewhere. But that’s what we’ve created. It’s based on many useful strategies, one being to circumnavigate the fear of the unknown.
In consequence, we made a track. You go to school and more school and then you work using specifically what you learned in school. You develop your skillset, train more, and start to take on more responsibility for other people learning what you have developed over the years.
But to live a truly creative life, a track is not so beneficial. As an artist, which we all are, it is urgent to follow what draws us in. It may not seem like it goes anywhere, but nothing is done in vain. One step leads to the next in the artist’s life. To do this we need to be okay with not knowing.
Not that we throw out the structured ways of living, completely. I’m suggesting that we learn to hold them lightly. For example, what worked yesterday might work today but let’s not assume that’s always the case. We stay open to the constant fluctuations of life.
Creating a New World
I would love to live in a world that promotes curious and creative pursuits more often. Where kids can follow their impulses in school and teachers can trust that. I believe we would not lose time or waste resources as we fear we would, but we would actually innovate at a much faster and more prolific rate.
To live like that, we have to be willing to be naive. We would need to love being beginners. To not know how things work, try and fail in a playful way, and create stuff that we may never share publicly.
From my view, the stakes are too high for the majority of our society to live like this. We have created such fixed agreements that now we feel that this is how life works. However, if we changed the agreements we would have a different approach.
A question walking me for a long time now is “What agreements do we have to change as a culture to promote a more natural way of living? And how do we go about unraveling the current agreements?”
Of course, this is not for me to answer. It’s a question that you’re also walking with. So a preliminary may be why do so many of us have such questions? I believe if we were to dig in that place, together, we would find something out.
One of the challenges and conundrums of this is that we have to go through the current agreements we find ourselves in, to establish new ones.
We have to find out how to come to terms with all the pain of individualization our current structures have brought before we reorganize. Otherwise, we try to fix it from the outside. Which, if you remember the last time you tried to “help” your loved one by telling them how they should change, you know how that goes.
Many of us want a new world, but we must be willing to grieve and give thanks to the old. What hasn’t been so right, just, or wholesome before. An acknowledgment that we too have been enrolled in something that’s not so free. Seeing through the constructs, we find a contrast. An ethical way of living. Then we can make the choice of becoming that new, free, world ourselves. Not waiting for it to come in a far-out future.
One way we can begin is by tuning in and sensing what resonates. Energy has never lied. If we allow ourselves to follow a thread, however chaotic it may seem, we have the potential to find freedom within. Simultaneously, the molds of long obsolete frameworks are broken because we no longer live out the fixed collective pattern.
To this day, I have no idea why I took steps toward a PhD in Neuroscience. Other than feeding my curiosity, the energy and information cultivated during that time go largely unused. Maybe I will never know why I went down that path. Perhaps it was meaningless.
We must accept that we might never know why some things resonate for us and others don’t. Not to look at what a certain path will give us, but rather how we are giving ourselves to something when we follow the curiosity from within. Becoming the space that the creative force requires to create.
If we walk in this way, steadily, the substance of the new world can land and be built through us.
P.S. If you enjoy my writing and want to support me further, I’m raising money to support writing my first book. Check the link below for more details.