On Friday, May 19th Ron was invited to speak at
the Probus Club of Nanoose Bay, a mere five minutes away from our home. The
club meets in St. Mary’s Church Hall on Powder Point Road at 9:15 am on the third
Friday of each month. This social club caters to the interests of a diverse and
active membership. Guests are welcome to attend. However, if you wish to join,
you will have to put your name on a waiting list until a space becomes
available.
After the morning meeting was finished and coffee break
over, Ron spoke to the ninety-five members present, his subject in diametric
opposition to the jovial, boisterous atmosphere in the Hall. He began by
reading a short passage near the beginning of The Defiant Mind :
“Imagine. Imagine you suddenly see the world disappearing
down a tunnel. Darkness surrounds a diminishing circle of light as it recedes
into the distance. Light is leaving you.
. . . All energy has left you.
Your limbs feel limp, your body sags into itself like a bean bag. You begin to
slide off the front edge of your chair. Suddenly. Involuntarily. You are in
slow-motion free fall. Perhaps it’s resignation. Whatever happens will happen.
There seems to be an inevitability about this event that you don’t comprehend
but that you curiously accept. Your body and spirit have been deflated in an
inexplicable way. You are experiencing a mystery. And you are terrified.”
Ron spoke for nearly an hour to a rapt audience and, when he
finished, the applause he received was generous and genuine. One member even
gave him a standing ovation.
The focus of Ron’s talk was to emphasize how common strokes
are:
“Every forty seconds someone
in North America
suffers a stroke.
Every four minutes someone in
Stroke is the leading cause of disability
In North America .”
Yet he also emphasized how little we know about the brain,
at one point quoting from Michio Kaku’s The
Future of the Mind:
“You may
have to travel twenty-four trillion miles, to the first
star outside our solar system, to find an
object as complex as
what is sitting on your shoulders. The mind
and the universe
pose the greatest scientific challenges of
all, but they share a
curious relationship. On the one hand they
are polar opposites.
One is concerned with the vastness of outer
space, where we
encounter strange denizens like black holes,
exploding stars,
and colliding galaxies. The other is
concerned with inner
space. Where we find our most intimate and
private hopes and
desires. This mind is no farther than our
next thought, yet we
are often clueless when asked to articulate
and explain it.”
However, argues Ron, if stroke survivors were encouraged to
talk about their stroke experiences and their individual stories were recorded,
over time, given the enormous number of people who are stricken world-wide by
stroke, enough data could be collected and computed, to provide a statistically
and scientifically reliable picture of the complex workings of the mind: Findings
which could enlighten us all about the capabilities of the brain and teach us
the importance of knowing ourselves; findings which could lead to brain therapy
as well as physical therapy.
