After a recent, somewhat baffling conversation with a colleague, my husband later made this statement to me: I’m a literal thinker; I say what I mean, and I believe people mean what they say. In other words, he doesn’t speak with a lot of innuendo and doesn’t look for hidden meanings in what others say, either.
From my own experience with him, it means if I’d like him to take out the garbage I have to ask, not complain that the garbage is full. It also means he’d make a very bad politician.
But his comment started me thinking. How many different kinds of thinkers are there? We’ve all heard about the overall grouping: right- and left-brainers. Right-brainers tend to be the more intuitive, artistically minded people, left-brainers more logical and analytical.
I used to think my engineering-type husband was all left brain. While it’s true that logic does prevail, he’s incredibly artistic but not in the way I am. I’m never happier than when I’m creating a new story and the pieces of plot and layers of character all fit together like some kind of puzzle. But my husband is never happier than when he’s creating something, too. What he creates won’t look anything like what I’d create – he makes robots and cars and mechanical things, while I create story worlds. But both are creative. I never knew how much we had in common even where we seem to be so different.
It surprised me to learn that creativity is necessary in more fields than just the artistic ones, although that probably wouldn’t come as any shock to the inventors out there.
So how do you tend to think? Does symbolism pop out at you when you read something? Do you look for deeper meaning when someone says something to you, or do you take it more literally? Is it possible for a left-brainer to use more of his right brain than we’d expect, and does that mean the right-brainers out there are using more of their left brain than we thought, too? Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t be so quick to discount the entire left side of my brain!
And now for a commercial, which both sides of my brain understand: the creative side wants to share my stories and the right side that must attend to business:
In anticipation of my soon-to-be-shipped Gilded Age romance, All In Good Time, my publisher is releasing my previous Gilded Age romance, Bees In The Butterfly Garden, as a free download for this week. And did you know this is Read An E-Book week, from 3/3 until 3/9? So the timing is perfect. 🙂
If you’d like to read an e-book this week, why not download one for free? Here are the links:
Kindle: click here
Nook: click here
Christian Book Distributors (for use with any e-reader app): click here
Happy Reading!
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