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Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I think of a lot of us find ourselves wanting life to be static sometimes, right? We find ourselves wanting to return to the good old days when times were easier, when times were something that we've already done before. I think that's part of the reason why I love old houses, especially houses that are over a hundred years old. I love going in these spaces and being somewhere where that has been there for a century and thinking about the people that have lived in that house and how that structure is still there housing people. I love that feeling of stability. I also love being out in the desert. In the middle of nowhere where you can be next to these rock formations that have been there for thousands of years and have been the same. This, giving me this illusion of static stability out there in nature. The feeling that somehow maybe things don't change.

But the truth is, this is just an illusion because life is a journey, it's a process. It's not a state. We ourselves go through various incarnations during a single lifetime, right? We have an incarnation as a baby, and then we have an incarnation as a little kid. Then we have an incarnation as a teenager in a totally different body, and then as a young adult, and then as a middle aged person, and then as an older person, each stage in a different body, so to speak. We live in time, not in space. Everything is an experience. We've talked before about how the average lifespan in the United States is 78 years old, that this is roughly equivalent to 4,000 weeks. This is the time that we live in. We like to think that we live in houses and in neighborhoods, but we really live in time. We live in experiences. Every day is different.

A lot of times we find ourselves feeling fear of the future and feeling fear of change, but our brains are evolved and adapted for change. Our ancestors that we inherited our brains from, they lived in this environment of scarce resources, of always changing conditions, changing weather, changing resources, changing seasons, changing predators, changing threats. In order to survive, they had to be really good at adapting to change. Life is and has always been in constant change. One year is never like the next one. We, we can't repeat and experience. Even watching a the same movie twice. It's not the same the second time, right? But we are built to adapt and to even thrive in change. That's why we have emotions instead of rigid reflexes. A lot of simpler animals that don't have an emotion system, that just have rigid leaf reflexes like jellyfish, they always react the same way to certain triggers. They're not adaptive. So, for example, a hydra, which is kind of like a jellyfish. It reflexively contracts, its tentacles when it's touched or it's exposed to light changes. A sea anemone, it automatically retracts its tentacles when it is touched or when the salinity changes in the water. A roundworm, if you touch it on the head, it will move backward. If you touch it on the tail, it will move forward. A clam or a muscle, it will snap shut when it, when you touch it or when the light changes. These are examples of animals that just have rigid reflexes. They always respond the same way to changes in the environment. Humans on the other hand, we evolved an emotion system in order to help us to be more adaptive to changes. So instead of always responding the same way to different changes in the environment and always moving forward when our heads are touched or always moving backward when our feet are touched, we have this emotion system where our brains are always evaluating the situation and trying to predict how this is gonna affect our concerns, and then organizing an emotional response based on that prediction that our brains make. But our emotions are cool because they are processes, not states, and so they are fitted toward a world where everything is always changing. So if when we see a predator and it looks like it's coming in our direction and our brain evaluates that in a minute, it's gonna be right on top of us, it will organize this emotion of fear, which will motivate us to wanna run away with a bunch of other hormonal changes in our bodies that help us to do that. But then if something happens and that predator, instead of coming toward us, walks off the other way, then our brain reevaluates the situation and how that future is gonna develop and gives us a different emotion and we change from fear to maybe curiosity. So this is one example of how our brains are wired for adaptation and to be able to handle change. Our brains are amazingly able to adapt to changes. There is a really cool book called The Brain that changes itself, and it tells about a couple of particular cases. There was a man who had a massive stroke and was unable to walk and he was told he would never be able to walk again because of the damage of hi in his brain. But his son developed this unconventional therapy that helped him to be able to regain function and to walk again. And an autopsy later after the man passed away showed that the brain damage had never healed. So this meant that, that his brain had actually reorganized itself to be able to compensate for the damage, and it learned how to take charge of everything that needs to happen when you walk from a different part of the brain, because the part that used to handle it had been completely damaged and taken outta the picture.

There was another woman whose balance system stopped working. Her vestibular system stopped working. But she started using this device that used electrodes connected to her tongue to send signals to her brain. And her brain eventually created new pathways to make sense of these signals so that she could walk with balance and she could have a sense of balance. And eventually she was actually able to walk without the device. Her brain had reorganized and rewired its self to be able to have a sense of balance, not from her inner ear vestibular system, but from her tongue. This is how adaptable, how plastic our brains are. We as a human species thrived because we could adapt to every climate, to all kinds of new conditions, to new challenges that were always coming our way. So think about this when you are feeling afraid of change and afraid of the future, you are built to ride the changes in life with grace. If you think of life as a horse and you're riding on the horse of life, and anyone who's ridden on a horse knows that it doesn't work very well if you're all stiff and you are not responding to the horse's movements with fluidity, well, your brain is built to be able to handle the horse of life with grace.

We in our family have a canoe and we live close to the ocean. And my husband has liked in the past to take our canoe out on the ocean toward this island that's about a kilometer and a half away from our beach. And one time I actually got the courage to go with him. So I'm sitting in the front of the canoe, he's in the back. I'm in the front because I'm lighter. Right? And the hard part about riding a canoe on the ocean is the breakers, getting through the breakers. So we had to paddle out past the breakers to get onto the open ocean toward this island. So we're riding through the breaker breakers. This is something I've never done before. And those of you who've ridden in a canoe know that your center of GRA gravity is pretty high when you're sitting in a canoe. It's not like riding in a kayak. So it's really easy to tip it over. It's very wobbly. You have to be able to shift your weight depending on which way the canoe is leaning. Plus you've got the waves coming through and lifting the canoe up. And I remember at one point the ocean, the waves lifted the, the nose of the canoe up where I was about a 45 degree angle. And here I am, clear up in the air. My husband's back down there in the back, and then the wave moves through and the canoe slaps back down on the water. And I didn't think, I just rode, I just rode on this side. I rode on that side. I, I didn't think about which side my body should be leaning toward. I just did it. My body just intuitively figured out how to react and how to row on this and that side, and how to balance when the canoe kept this way and that way. And we didn't overturn the canoe, we made it through the breakers. We made it all the way out to the island. And also back. When we, when we came back in through the breakers, I had to do the same thing. But I was pretty amazed looking back on this, that I was able to do this. I'd never done this before, but my brain had the capability to adapt to all of these changes that the canoe was giving to me as it was, as it was making its way through the breakers.

And this is a good meta metaphor for how our brains work in life. You'll know what to do. You'll be able to develop new abilities. You'll be able to adapt to the changes that life gives you because that's the way that your brain is wired. There are really impressive reports of people who have suffered unthinkable loss, but have actually adapted to that loss. There's a woman named Grace Spence Green. She had her back broken because there was a man who was jumping off a building to commit suicide, and he actually jumped on top of her by mistake and broke her back and she became paralyzed. And this is when she was young. She was a medical student at the time. But she says that she wouldn't take back her injury and the resulting life changes because they've made her who she is. She talks about embracing the identity and the agency and the insight that she gained through that trauma. She uses her experience to connect with others and she works as a doctor in pediatrics and she adv advocates for accessibility and empathy and control in treatment for people with disabilities. And I'll put a link in the show notes so you can read more about her. There's another woman named Mama Shoo Harris, who lost two sons. One was hit by a car as he was trying to cross the street. He was just a toddler. The other was a son who was killed as a result of gun violence. But she consciously decided to reframe her identity from a victim of tragedy to an agent of change. She transformed her grief into action and she created a community, which she calls the Avalon Village, which she made to uplift other people and honor her son's life through service. And this community is really cool. It has this goddess marketplace, which is a storefront where women entrepreneurs can sell their goods. It has a homework house, which is a learning space for youth where they can study and get tutoring and attend learning activities, and they have access to computers and printers and a music studio. And a music studio And a library. It has a community garden that provides food for the people in the community and it teaches youth how to garden. And she hasn't stopped. She has goals to build a school and a cafe, and a greenhouse, and a healing center. She's gotten funding for this project through many of different sources, but she started out by selling $5 fish sandwiches, but she started attracting attention and she got contributions from musicians and artists and various groups.

So even unthinkable changes that involve losses, terrible losses can be something that we can learn to adapt to. It's been done before. You can see it in these two different examples. So for that reason, we can trust the brain that we received from our ancestors, that evolved over millions of years to adapt to change. That's one of the superpowers that your brain has is adaptation. And this can help you to remember to not be afraid of change because you are built for an ever changing world. You've got the equipment. You can do stuff you've never done before. You can journey to new places. You can have new experiences. You can develop new capacities.

The world is new every day in the sense that it's different every day, and life is about discovery and adaptation. Resisting this truth is like kicking against the pricks. That's a saying that comes from ancient farming. A prick is a pointed stick or a goad that was used to prod the oxen as they're plowing the field, and if the oxen tries to kick back against it, it will strike the sharp point of the prick and it will just hurt itself. It will cause pain. And so this phrase came to mean that we shouldn't try and resist things that are inevitable, that are just part of reality in a way that's just gonna harm ourselves. It's true. The world is new and different every day, but you're built to deal with that. so use this year to continue discovering who you are, to discover what your body is capable of. You don't know yourself. You have potential that has not yet been realized. You'll develop it in cooperation with life. The experiences you have and the way that you adapt to them and respond to them will make you who you will become. Just like me going through those breakers and rowing on this side and rowing on that side, and balancing and counterbalancing. Discovering these skills that my brain knows how to produce in the right situations.

I started playing the piano when I was really young. I was two years old. And since I started so young, my fingers adapted to the keyboard. Those of you on YouTube can see that my pinky fingers are crooked, and it's because from a very young age, I was trying to always reach further with my hands, and so my pinky fingers actually grew crooked in order to increase my reach. This is a demonstration of how your body will adapt to your reality and even unthinkable losses like those that we talked about a minute ago, we can adapt to those. Sometimes it involves remapping, how we see the world in order to take in new information. But life is about discovery and adaptation. So don't be afraid of new things. Your brain is built to adapt to them. You have the superpower of adaptation. That's what humans do better than anything else. We adapt to change. That's why we're still here.

So if you're looking out at this new year and finding yourself afraid of what it might offer, just remind yourself about the superpower that your brain has. So whatever demands this year is going to bring for you, you will find, you can develop the resources to meet it because of this amazing brain that you have inherited from your ancestors. Trust it. That's what I wanna leave with you today. Thanks for joining me and have a good week.