What it means to be a real human being 01

Fingering sound: Jacob Collier

For Jan McCormick and Jimbo Graves

Jacob Collier - The Audience Choir (Live at O2 Academy Brixton, London)

I’d like to invite you to watch a video twice. Here is the video. Just watch it first, seriously. Don’t keep reading, stop now, watch the video.

You watched it, right? Don’t cheat.

If you are anything like me, you may have tears still streaming down your face. The moment I started watching, my eyes just welled up with tears, and they did not stop until long after the piece ended. Why am I crying? Beauty.

Beauty, beauty, beauty.

Because this is a peacemaker at work harmonizing a field the size of a concert hall. This is a demonstration of what it means to be a real human being.

Ok.

I’m still crying. I’m holding my breath and I’m still crying.

But– now, I want to explain something neurological to you that is on the edge of my ability to translate into words, but that you will be able to see the moment you start to look for it. Over the past year, I have been working individually with a client who lost her proprioception eight years ago as the result of a neurological injury to her toe. The toe went numb, the numbness spread to the foot, from the foot to the leg, from the leg to her torso. And then, for 8 years, she could not feel anything in her body at all. When we met, and she explained this to me, I didn’t understand how it was possible. She had broken more than twenty bones from falling. She could not walk without holding onto a wall. If she raised her arm to pick up a cup of coffee she would pitch forward because her body, which could not feel itself, did not counterbalance her own weight. This rare neurological injury is called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. She had seen ten or fifteen neurologists. They told her her nerves had died. (I laughed when she told me they said this, which was rude. But this does not happen that nerves just die off. Even in Parkinson’s disease, that is not what is happening.)