Oliver Sacks' autobiography On The Move: A Life

[Ambo Suno]

On The Move: A Life, by Oliver Sacks has a highly integral feel to me in that it includes a lot of breadth and depth about life that feels woven through the life story of the Author, with easy understandability.

As you remember, Dr Sacks, neurologist, wrote the book Awakenings in which Robert Di Nero played the post-encephalic patient who regained much function following an experimental l-dopa treatment, in the movie based on the book. He also wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and various other books, book reviews, reviews of scientific articles, and articles themselves.

In this autobiography, Oliver, born in 1933 to two highly ethical and bright medical doctor parents in England, with three brothers, gets to follow his interests as a child to a high degree. He is interested in nature and science and physical activity, often on the more solitary side.

He has a period of loving motorcycles and long solo trips, weight lifting (it seems he is exceedingly strong), and he becomes addicted to several drugs and this at times accentuated his already quirky attentional and cognitive functional capacities. Sacks might be mildly Aspergeresque in some areas.

Interesting that his work gravitates to the unusual, anomalous, and non-linear, non-tidy facets of mental-actional living in this world.

In the process of his professional life's non-usual neurologic involvements, he comes in contact with many of the growing edge and fringy explorers of sensate, perceptual, affective, cognitive mind and consciousness. Many names of colleagues would be familiar to IPMS and integral student-practitioners. As one reads this autobiography one gets a feel for the burgeoning, exploratory, exciting, hope and caring filled evolution of knowledge of how humans are in their mainstream and in their acute individualities.

Spirituality is not explicitly addressed much, yet it may be felt as implicit.

As I read the book, I bookmarked page after page of how I would like to document integral, humanistic, and growing-edge scientific insights and sources. As often happens for me, b) I never get around to writing the almost thesis-like review of the work as I am momentarily inspired to do, and, a) can't believe on how many pages I find nugget after nugget that I want to share.

Life was not completely easy for Oliver Sacks, but the fine, vibrant overall trajectory and day-by-day contents seem rather luminous and wonderful.

Oliver Sacks died in 2015 - what a fascinating and fortunate man.

http://www.oliversacks.com/