The first time I had the opportunity to speak with Patricia Varga, the founder of A Woman With Wings, I was delighted to find that we had more than a few beliefs in common.  One in particular was regarding the idea that people are right-brain or left-brain dominant, which, much to the chagrin of our present-day Renaissance Men and Women, seems to have become colloquially integrated into our population’s approach to living.  Despite being two different people with two different stories, Patricia and I have both come to value the mentality that the Creative and Emotional need not be separated from the Analytical and Systematic; in fact, they should not be separated.

I personally arrived at this conclusion in college, after a decade of oscillating between labeling myself as a right-brained or left-brained person. Since a young age, I always had scores of interests and did various activities to pursue each of them in my daily life, whether it was piano lessons, art classes, joining a soccer team, or reading a book.  Of course as I grew older, interests changed, new passions developed, and meanwhile, there was always that constant common question, either lingering in the back of my mind or being posed to me, of what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Over the course of about ten years, I went from wanting to be a lawyer, to thinking that fashion design was my calling, to aspiring to be a savvy businesswoman in the fashion industry, to dreaming to become a respected photographer, to finally, by my senior year in high school, having every intention of going to college to major in psychology and then go to law school.  It was always so difficult for me to attach myself to just one career path because I could not figure out if I belonged in the creative world or the more logical world; was I an artist or an analyst?  I had interests in both realms! After going to college though, and discovering even more passions, I finally realized that I don’t want to choose between these two worlds, nor was I obligated to. I eventually declared my major to be International Relations with a minor in Music Industry, and while I still am not completely sure of what career I want to pursue, I am definitely sure that I have the potential to fuse all of my interests together from both the Creative and the Analytical world and apply this amalgam to any job, activity, or challenge I undertake.

It is an incredible shame that this mentality of needing to choose between the realms of creativity and logic is being forced upon generation after generation, simply because of historical convention.  I don’t think the problem necessarily is in the fact that it makes people feel obligated to label themselves, especially considering that humans do have a natural propensity to want to find groups or individuals with which they can identify; the problem, rather, is in the implications of this epithet, that once having chosen between the right-brain or left-brain label, a person is confined exclusively to this way of thinking.  It is a restriction that results in an immanent bias, leaving nothing open to possibility.  Why put strictures on a mind, when it has the capability to apply creativity and emotion to an analytical and systematic world, and vice versa?  Those who have discovered the futility in isolating these two realms, who I would call the Renaissance Men and Women of today, are the people who have fused their creativity and emotion with their logic to do incredible, if not seemingly inconceivable, things.  This kind of potential is something that all people should have, and in our present-day world where problems are growing exceedingly complex, it MUST be encouraged.