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How a Brain-First Mom Learned to Be More in Heart—and How It Saved Her Life
The secret to a good and meaningful life is not what you think.
Literally. The good life comes from more than thinking, more than smarts, more than brainpower. No matter how devoted we are to the idea that the secret to getting ahead is thinking your way there, the truth is that the happiest and most fulfilled people I know add something else equally powerful to the mix. Luckily, that “something” is something we all have—but that a lot of us are out of touch with.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time proceeding as if you were going to handle everything by the hard work of your brain, powering through all challenges and opportunities that way, finding your success that way. And, if you’re like me, that has brought successes. Maybe you’ve also found, as I have, that relying on brain this way can also come with a side of exhausting and paralyzing overanalysis, worry, insecurity, and indecision. Or, the opposite, leaping before you look, convinced of your rightness without seeing all the angles. You might have noticed the same things I have about how you can get mired in problems without ever getting similarly “stuck” on positives. Or, how much competition you engage in, with yourself and others, where even when you “win” there is a lot of stress, fear, and loneliness created that outweighs the benefit.
It’s an overwrought life, with so much brain without any of the complementary force this book is about: heart. It’s the combination of heart with brain that provides the key to a good and meaningful life.
Heart is the name I’ve given to the collection of superpowers I first observed in my daughter Emily. Emily is an unlikely teacher for me, and I’m the last person you’d predict to be delivering a message emphasizing heart more than brain, as you’ll see. But understanding heart has changed my life, so here I am. Everything I need to know about success, happiness, and a life of meaning and purpose I learned from a girl who can’t make change for a dollar, tie her shoes, or read this book. I learned more this way than I ever learned from my academic experience, training as a psychiatrist, or from any self-improvement campaign I ever tried.
Heart came into my life in a form in which it commonly first appears: profound heartbreak. To become aware of heart, I had to exhaust everything else in me, everything I knew. I had to reach desperation. When I felt heart, it was because I felt it had shattered and was beyond repair—when I thought my life was ruined and I was beyond repair.
Over the last twenty years, I’ve come to understand much more about heart and its immense power. To my surprise, the manifestation of heart that essentially saved my life—heart showing up at a crisis point—is not even the only powerful or useful part of heart. As valuable is the way we can call on heart intentionally, if we know how. When we do, we uncork the secret to happiness and success, and to achievement, love, connection, purpose, and meaning. The secrets to a good life.
Of course, I’m not talking about the physical, anatomical organs brain and heart, for most of this book, but using the terms metaphorically to describe patterns of how we think and behave and understand the world. Both heart and brain as I am using them would trace to the actual brain. If it helps you to think of it this way, heart is a metaphor for undervalued and underused brain capabilities. For myself, I define this kind of heart as simply as possible: heart is what Emily does.
In my hardest, darkest moments and months, heart was there. But heartbreak was not. Heart was not broken, not by a long shot. I know now this heart can’t be broken. It is heart that steps forth when everything else fails, to pick us up and get things done and move us forward and keep us going. Even—especially—when all that seems impossible. That’s how heart eventually pulled me through the most harrowing part of my life. Heart is good in a crisis.
Since then, I’ve learned to find my way to heart even when I’m not in dire straits. The more I accessed heart intentionally, the more I came to understand just how much heart can do. The true power of heart is revealed in ordinary, everyday moments, like the millions of times things are not going my way and I need more motivation, courage, patience, and/or confidence, to name just a few.
This realization created radical change in every aspect of my life. I’d gone through most of my life with my standard operating procedure being about as opposite from heart as you can get. I led with my brain. And I found a lot of success that way. Enough so that I never really even considered there was any other way to be.
Then life proved to me that there was in fact another way. That there had to be another way, because my way eventually ran into a brick wall. The shocking thing was that this other way, the way of heart, did operating by brain alone one better. Adding the force of heart to my repertoire, using it in tandem with brain, felt like discovering and unleashing a personal superpower. Together, heart and brain allowed me a broader range of responses to a situation.
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When I look back now on the moment when everything changed for me, I can see so clearly how heart went to work for me—how it saved me and everything I hold most dear. I also see all the ways brain tried to manage the situation, and all the reasons it could not.
The moment Emily was first handed to me, and I met my beautiful child, I experienced a surge of love so strong that I felt the room shake. I’d known this euphoria once before, when Emily’s older sister Tess was born. This ecstasy is one of the most beautiful and powerful forces in the universe. This was a pure experience of heart.
When Emily was just a day old, that intense feeling of love seemingly vanished as I listened to the pediatric neurologist pronounce the words brain damage over my daughter’s hospital bassinet. All joy was instantly swept away, replaced by fear, sadness, guilt, and despair.
I heard the doctor’s descriptions of Emily’s congenital brain anomaly and the dire effects it might cause—she may never walk, she may never talk, she may be profoundly intellectually disabled—and I was sure my life was ruined. I assigned so much value to intellect that I couldn’t see any way of having a “good” life without it—for Emily or for me.
It would take almost a full year for me to fall in love with my daughter again.
That’s how long it took for brain to so thoroughly wear itself out that it left an opening for heart to squeeze through and take its turn.
A couple of days after hearing the doctor’s terrible diagnosis, I left the hospital with my husband, gathered our newly expanded family back together in our home, and got on with the regular busyness of life with two jobs, a toddler, and a newborn. Just as anyone would have. But in my mind, some piece of time stood still, keeping a large part of me in that devastating moment. I was engulfed in a numbness to all experience that stretched into weeks and months and, in some ways, years. My ability to think and feel was muted by my certainty about the all-consuming nature of the disaster looming over my life. I was obsessed with getting to the bottom of this problem, coming up with “solution” after “solution,” my mind looping endlessly with one thought: Emily is brain damaged … Emily is brain damaged … Emily is brain damaged.
This was a pure experience of brain. Or, more exactly, of brain in over its head, working overtime long past when what it was doing was actually working. The experience stretched on through a long list of things I had to research, blame I had to lay, causes I had to discover, wheels I had to reinvent, and numerous strategies and interventions I had to implement in order to 1) fix Emily and 2) fix myself (since clearly, I was at fault somehow).
After many, many months of this, brain had given absolutely all it had. In the gap created by brain’s depletion, heart could finally make itself known again, much like it did when I first held Emily. Heart was there all along, but brain had to move aside for me to be able to feel it.
It happened the way it often does: by default. Brain tapped out for just long enough, and I was suddenly in heart. One moment I was fully in the funk brain kept me in, futilely trying to make Emily’s brain damage go away, desperately shaking toys at Emily in the middle of another sleepless night. Emily was unimpressed, her eyes wandering as they did, her little hands gripped up too tight (one of the hallmarks of her brain dysfunction, though at that point we did not yet know what if anything it would signify in the long term).
Then in the next moment, I saw Emily in a whole new light. Heart hit just like that. Now when I looked, I took in Emily’s uneven smile, her soft head, her baby smell, her squeaky coos. Sweet, precious, lovely Emily. My Emily. It was an acute and again almost physical sensation, seemingly out of nowhere, and it consumed me entirely: a powerful swell of sheer love for the child, the specific, wonderful child, right there in front of me. Emily, exactly as she had been, but entirely transformed in my new line of sight. Because of course nothing had changed in Emily. But everything had changed in me.
This is how so many people experience heart: in the highest highs and lowest lows. Heart comes unbidden in times of joy (like falling in love) or of despair (like grieving a dire diagnosis). The biggest impact of heart, however, comes when we learn how to tap into it purposefully and at any time.
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Emily has watery spaces where parts of her brain are supposed to be. Her IQ ranks in the lowest quartile. She has significant physical challenges from cerebral palsy as well. There’s a lot she can’t do.
But what Emily can’t do—and she does have some very real limitations—doesn’t tell you much about who or how Emily is. Emily, now grown and almost done with school, is brave, charismatic, focused, confident, highly productive, keenly observant, engaged, decisive, playful, and an absolute whiz at making people want to be around her. She is a lover of baking, Barney, shopping, and James Taylor tunes. She is a struggling but determined reader and swimmer, and a popular staff assistant in the school district’s superintendent’s office.
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Bloch
