Gray Matter

I am the type of person who does not find benefit in black-and-white thinking. It’s my belief that very few things are truly black-and-white and that instead, we spend much of our lives navigating in the gray. There are times in our relationships when things aren’t great; when we don’t know what’s going to happen; where neither person is right and the truth is in the middle. There are periods of gray in our careers when we are weighing our desire to do impactful work with the realities of life and the responsibilities that we hold. And I find a lot of gray in my relationship with God. Some aspects of my faith are black-and-white, like my belief in the triune God. But there are other things that I still see gray areas in. For example, there’s a scripture that says that everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial (1 Corinthians 6:12). To me that Scripture highlights the gray that we have to navigate as Christians. Just because you are not a slave to something doesn’t mean that it benefits you. We have free will, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should do everything we can do. That’s gray.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about the gray parts of life is because I am recognizing the polarities that exist in my life. One of the greatest things I’ve learned in the past year is the concept of polarities. The formal definition of a polarity is <the state of having two opposite or contradictory tendencies, opinions, or aspects>. Let me give you an example. A common polarity in life is stability versus change. We are constantly tempted to change something about ourselves. Our skin, our hair, our clothes, our car, our jobs, our relationships, the list goes on. Change is not a bad thing, in fact, change can be a great thing. Some people need to make life changes every few years or they get bored. But just like some people thrive in change, some people thrive in stability. They like knowing the surety of something, and they enjoy the safety that predictability brings. Stable folks are not against change, but they need a reason for it and want to plan for it. Stable people sometimes correlate change with chaos, and change seekers sometimes correlate stability with redundancy. So now you see how these are polarities of each other, and now that you know the definition, you can probably think of several more types of polarities that exist in your life.

I am definitely someone who enjoys stability. It could be my propensity to worry and have anxiety or just the way my brain chemistry is made up, but it’s easy for me to have what is called catastrophic thinking. This is where in any situation you consider irrational and worst-case scenarios. And you don’t have to think about something big to have this kind of thought pattern. For example, I do not like making left-hand turns on busy streets, and I’ve been like this for years. When I’m confronted with having to make a left turn, I sometimes get this irrational fear that another car is going to hit mine. Has this ever actually happened to me? Nope. But at that moment my brain believes it could happen, and I’ve found myself sitting for 5 minutes waiting for cars to pass by (with folks honking behind me). I’m stable in the way that I drive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have room to change.

I shared that example because I want to make the point of saying that just because you recognize polarities in your life does not mean that they have to stay that way. Just because I am stable and have often done the same things does not mean that I should not be open to change. It doesn’t mean that I am redundant either, because there is wisdom in many of the decisions I make. What it does mean is that I have to learn to live in the gray more. I cannot look at things through a lens of either/or, but instead through a lens of both/and. I can be a stable Mabel and seek adventures and experiences at the same time. I can be hesitant about the future and be expectant about the future at the same time. The polarities in my life do not define me, but I can let them give color and context to my thoughts and my decisions.

As I was preparing to write this blog I started thinking about the phrase gray matter and I decided to research it. One thing you may not know about me is that I find neuroscience fascinating. I think it’s amazing how the mind works and how there are interconnected neurons and transmitters that ultimately shape how we think, how we respond, and how we process information. So I was delightfully surprised that when I researched gray matter I learned that it is directly involved with the brain and how we think. Gray matter plays a big role in many of our mental functions; it’s where our information processing happens and it gives us our ability to think and reason. It is key to what controls our movement, memory, and our emotions. Because it’s so important to our brain, the decrease and/or damage of gray matter is what leads to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

Hopefully, you’re still with me, because I was so excited to learn about this. I am the type of person who believes that God created science, and I think it’s beautiful that God created a space in our brains that allows us to process and intake information and emote. Simply put, God allows us to have gray matter in our brains so that we can process the gray areas in our lives. He is the chief scientist, and He never misses.

I love that God was thoughtful of me this week. He put the phrase dark matter in my heart and then allowed the meaning of the word to speak to what I have been thinking and feeling this week. Sidenote: God will talk to you and do special things for you based on your personality. God allowed me to learn something really cool about a topic that He knows interests me because he knows me. 💖

I am still fascinated with gray matter and knowing me I’ll probably find a book to read so I can learn more. But for this blog, I really want you to accept and allow yourself to sit in the gray matter in your life. Those places where you don’t know what is the right way, what the future holds, and whether you should make that change or remain stable. There is beauty in the gray of life, and there can be joy in the polarities that we live with. I have been asking God about the difference between being stable and being stagnant, and as usual, His sandal is upside my head. At first, I wasn’t in a place to hear Him, but once I recognized the gray matter in my heart and mind I began to listen. I hope you listen when He speaks to you too.

See y’all next week~