And If Your Second Toe is Longer Than the Big Toe, It Means You’re the Leader In Your Family

I read somewhere that you could tell if a person was an extrovert or an introvert by where they looked when they were concentrating.

Let’s do a little experiment.

Quickly now! When was the last time you had a really good pastry? Not just a so-so pastry, but something light and flaky, something that made you think of calling a friend and asking if she’s heard of this place?

Did you have to think about that? If so, where did you look? Up? Down?

Wait. You didn’t close your eyes, did you? Because now that I think about it, I don’t recall what it means if you close your eyes while thinking.

According to whatever it was I was reading at the time – and with my library, it could be anything from Home Dentistry Saves Money! to 101 Things To Do With Questionable Mushrooms – extroverts look up while seeking answers while introverts look down.

I suspect we all have our methods, our peccadilloes regarding concentration. I have a nephew, for example, who, even as a baby, rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers while searching for an answer.

“Would you like some milk, Liam?”

“Hmm.” Rub rub rub. “Yeh. Yike mewk.”

Anyway, this all came back to mind the other day in yoga. We were working our way into a balancing pose (“place both hands on the floor, rest your ribs on your elbows, and shoot your legs out behind you, allowing them to float up and hover six inches above the floor”) and invited to concentrate on our “drishdi”, a point of intense focus.

And that’s when I noticed that I have a drishdi and that it has been the same all my life: slightly up and to the left. In my world, the answers are just over that hill, just over there to the left.

The answers are just over there.

I’m an extrovert.

And for some reason, I’ve got a craving for a really good pastry.