Debra Landwehr Engle "Everyday Miracles"
Our thoughts are alien to one another.
Well, that’s a no-brainer. But we get angry fast when people speak and act from a viewpoint that seems completely foreign to us.
In college, I took a Fortran programming course (yes, the Dark Ages, I know). I’d bailed out of math and science after Algebra II. But I was marrying a computer programmer and thought taking a computer class might be a wifely thing to do.
Several weeks into the course, I still didn’t get it. I studied and read and reread and highlighted and underlined, and none of it made any sense to me. Finally, one night when I was reading a chapter for the fourth time, a light bulb went on, and I could see. The answer was there, right in front of my eyes, as though the barricades had just been removed from a new neuro pathway.
I’ve completely forgotten any Fortran code, but I’ve remembered that people’s brains literally are wired differently. This has come in handy when my husband and I talk politics. In the end, we want many of the same things—we just have different paths to get there, and his make just as much sense to him as mine make to me.
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