Building New Pathways
Art (literary, visual, music, film, performance), the mind and life benefit from new learning and new activities.
Hello, fellow Bluestockings! Thank you to everyone joining and being part of my salon. I apologize for today’s lateness in delivery. Yesterday was a hell of a day with my day job and family responsibilities.
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My father, brother, paternal cousin and daughter, who was just accepted by Senn Arts (a division of Nicholas Senn High School) in Chicago, are talented visual artists.
The visual talent gene skipped me. Though I’ve been told I have a way with words, I can barely draw a stick figure. The one time I did try to draw a representational picture in my writer’s notebook of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck from a 1980s photograph, my effort more resembled the portrait Napoleon Dynamite drew of a classmate he wanted to take to a high school dance. My daughter’s current art teacher told me her drawing is above grade level. My own is definitely way below my highest degree of MFA (in writing, fiction concentration of course).
I didn’t draw in my writer’s notebook because I thought I would gain a new skill or found a desire to work exclusively in a new medium. I drew not only to nurture my own creativity but to open new neural pathways in my brain.
For centuries, medical practitioners believed neuro connections could only be made when we are babies and children. Any damage meant those connections would be forever lost.
For more than twenty years, medical research has dispelled that belief. Whether the brain is healthy or impaired by injury, illness or disability, new pathways can be made because of neuroplasticity. In the early years of my MS diagnosis, my neurologist’s nurse found it wonderful I was studying Italian because it was forming new neural pathways for me.
Whether we study a new language, gain new knowledge or embark on a new skill, or brush our teeth with our non-dominant hand, these open new pathways and strengthen our mind, art and life.
I started cross stitching in 2019. I wanted to pick up a new hobby that was totally out of my comfort zone of reading, cooking and playing video games.
At the time, I was working at the Barnes and Noble in Evanston (RIP), they always have beginners crafty sort of kits for all sorts of things. They also carry the British crafty - cross stitch, needlepoint, embroidery, etc - magazines that include a basic craft project with an issue. Most of said projects are a tad on the tchostky side for me, but if you want to teach yourself something, I found it was the way to do it.
So I started cross stitching. It's actually fun to stab fabric with a sharp, pointy object! The real challenge is keeping the cats away from what ever I'm working on. Because of course, cats are cats and very curious.