Right brain meets left brain, meets right brain again...

My earliest days of school were filled with a passion for the written word, ever since I learned to read in senior kindergarten/grade 1 with the help of student tutors from the higher grades in our school.

I wrote my first literary masterpiece, "The Attack of the Coca-Cola People," in grade 4, followed by “Revenge of the Libby’s Bean People” in grade 5. That was the same year that my school entered me into a city-wide creative writing contest in grade 5 and I took home 2nd prize and a book of Aboriginal stories and legends called “I Am an Indian.” My grade 10 English teacher once gave me a grade of A+++ for a story I turned in (who knew there was such a grade on the marking curve?) and I came in 2nd in a school-wide creative writing contest.

Much of my angst-filled teenage years was spent dropping in and out of high school and writing poetry in 24-hour donut shops on Toronto’s Yonge Street at 2am under the buzz and inspiration of cheap and effective over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, trying desperately to find meaning to existence and some reason to not check out on it. I wrote some brilliant stuff around that time, and it must have been enough because I’m still alive and kicking on Planet Granite 40 years later.

One of the reasons I dropped out of school in the first place was because I wanted to be a filmmaker and the system refused to teach you that in high school. Instead, they said you had to learn biology and trigonometry and enough other useless (at the time) knowledge to earn a piece of paper that would certify that you were sufficiently edumacated to be of use to the world.

[Aside to those of you itching to tell me that school was trying to expand the breadth of my knowledge by exposing me to a diversity of subjects: No, it wasn't. It was trying to teach me to conform and be a good little citizen. If I ever needed to know the boring and useless stuff the system wanted me to learn, I was smart enough to have been able to scoot over to my local library and grab a bunch of books and teach myself]

I nearly got my chance to study filmmaking in my early 20s after I researched film programs in Canada and found an interesting one at the University of Regina. In Saskatchewan. Where they grow wheat. And where you can still see your dog running across the prairie two days after it gets loose. I hopped onto a bus one day and travelled a good two days across Canada to check out the university and the program. I liked what I saw, so I applied for and got accepted into a one-year pre-university program that I had to complete before being able to join the film program.

Then life took me on a different path. To the Arctic. And I never did get to take my pre-u program. And I never did get to learn how to make films. Instead, I learned retail store management and then jumped to work with the government once I had learned enough about business to be useful to others. My passion for writing had never left me, but now my writing was all from my left brain, the logical, structured, reasoned, and analytical writing of business plans and proposals to help clients get money from governments and banks to pursue their life’s passions and dreams.

I did that for 20+ years in Canada before life took me on a different path. To tropical Malaysia. Where my second life, the encouragement of a soulmate, and the will of the Creator have been helping me to come to some conclusions about what I want to be when I grow up. I’m still not entirely there yet, but my left brain and right brain have been on better terms with each other with increasing frequency lately, leading to opportunities in storytelling and creative writing for film and video, and not-so-creative writing for entrepreneurial books. I may not be or end up entirely full circle to where I might like to be in the fulfilment of my right brain aspirations, but I’m much closer these days to achieving it than I have been at any other point in my life. Which is a bit of a marvel and a wonder to me as I head into 6-series life in a few years…