I have long loved this notion that Rilke talks about of being stretched between two poles—I am fascinated with the space between. I am a person who is often impatient in my attempts to get from here to there. And yet because I love learning, and because I have many areas that need mending and where I need to keep learning—this middle space is where I spend much of my time.

And this poem has been floating though my head because this week I am living between two languages and if attention is the act that creates our sense of existence, then language is the way we make meaning of it. And when you are living between two languages you are asked to inhabit that in-between space with a fullness that rarely happens in adulthood.

This week I am in Germany where I was an exchange student and not only is it a vacation in the traditional sense of being away from work, but living a week in a foreign language is, in a very real way, a vacation from myself. I get to live in the world with a different set of thoughts, a different way of engaging in conversation, and a different orientation to my world.  

By adulthood, so much of our thought and communication is habit. Our brains are always going and there is a constant internal chatter. Much of the time we complain about our internal chatter—but it is a highly functional aspect of being human. This internal talk is meant as a kind of inner coach: to help us pay attention, stay on track, follow the rules of the group and learn new things. We think of self-talk as our ideas—as the thing that we think—the thoughts that make us who we are.  But much of our self-talk came from others. It was ‘other talk’ that we listened to and made our own. It was the voices of parents, teachers, coaches. All language is receptive first—we are born listening—we take in everything first and learn to speak much later.

And learning and living in a foreign language is a lovely experiment in living in a different set of thoughts. I didn’t hear the same set of expectations or rules of living in German that I heard in English. I didn’t experience the same trauma and have none of the protections of internal dialogue that you create to survive it. And while I am here I am too busy trying to pay attention to what is actually being said or what I need to say to bother to translate any internal dialogue that might arise—so it fades away—leaving me only with my present work of listening or speaking in what feel like  new words.

This space between two languages is quieter—it is more open. It is a moment of living in a self that is unencumbered, even for small stretches of time, by the old tapes, the old rules.

In his first book, The Brain that Changes Itself, one of the many neuroscientists that Norman Doidge describes is the work of Taub, who discovered how the brain and body can heal from stroke. Typically, with a stroke—there can be loss of capacity on one side of the body—you lose the capacity to use your right arm and leg, for example. And the conventional treatment has been physical therapy of the affected body parts—you would exercise the weak body part which wasn’t very effective and eventually you would simply get by with the limbs that worked.

Taub turned this practice upside down. In his work with primates, he found that if he constrained the limb that worked—by wrapping it to the body with an ace bandage or putting a cast on it so it couldn’t move at all, the limb that was affected and wasn’t working, actually began working again. The brain rewired the connection to that part of the body. And when he tried this approach on humans it had the same effect. If you put an oven mitt on the good hand—the hand that still worked, and had people do tasks with their affected hand, they regained their ability to use their weakened hands. And even years after the stroke the weakened part of the body could be strengthened this way.

As a psychologist and someone who has struggled with my own healing, I have long tried to figure out how to translate this tangible and practical solution for rewiring into the more intangible psychological realm: how do you put an oven mitt on your defenses so you don’t use them anymore, how do you wrap up or quiet your habits of responding so you have to lean in to new ones?

One thing I have come to know for sure about healing is that if you can get the feeling of the ‘new thing’ even for a moment, even in a dream or in some way understand it through metaphor—you can work your way towards it in increments. Many years ago, in my own healing, when I was working to find this in between resting place I would lie in a hammock—suspended from gravity and held between those two poles that Rilke described.  

And at least for self-talk and some of our inner dialogue—a foreign language may be the closest I’ve experienced to that oven mitt. Living between two languages I am getting to see how you can live for even moments at a time with a part of the self that moves freely without the old constraints.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Bonus Poem* A poem I wrote years ago inspired by Rilke inspired by the poem above

Rilke’s Hammock

 When Rilke said to take your two

well disciplined strengths and stretch them—

between two opposing poles

he was just showing us

how to set up a hammock

that might hold our whole world—

maybe even make it whole.

This hammock inside your heart,

he said,

is where God learns.

Okay, the hammock was really my idea.

But what else would you do with such great ropes

braided together with your strengths?

Besides, it was a beautiful day

and I wanted a space big enough

for both me and God to climb in. 

I don’t know what God learned that day

from my brave attempts to lean back

swinging in canvas strung from those opposing poles,

my eyes looking up into the treetops

and my weight trusting a gravity I have never known.

God seemed to rest while listening to the wind through the pines

and it was my turn to learn something about love.