Brain

 None of us knows or can know how our brains develop into minds. What we see, hear, feel and learn as we grow from childhood all gradually build up an architecture in the brain that learns to collect and sort what comes at it. We get a vision of reality and a mechanism that allows us to engage the world.

This mechanism is different for every person, and it’s an accomplishment that we can all even find pieces of reality to share and agree on. How this happens is currently beyond our understanding and will probably always be.

We like to believe there’s some brain configuration that we could call “normal.” The rest is mental illness or genius. But in fact, it’s just the brains we start with, the brains we build and the brains we use to act on the world.

Some of us get brains that act as our own enemies. Some of us get brains that fragment our realities. Some of us get brains that are dysfunctional in the world we call sane. All of us get brains that will fall apart at paces we can’t control. All of us will, to some degree, lose ourselves and the ones we love with the aging of our brains.

If you have a healthy brain, have patience with those whose brains are failing, crumbling, attacking or are plagued by delusions or paranoia.