The New Road

Exercising My Brain

As much as you would think that my job stretches my brain on a daily basis, it really doesn't. Most of what I do is the same type of thing over and over again. It's only when I write articles that I flex my other brain muscles.

This realization came into stark relief last night as I was reading books to Megan. One of the pages had a picture of a school room and the alphabet. The task was to find one thing in the room for each letter. And, before you ask, yes, there was a Xylophone. Megan was really no help at all since she is just learning. So it was up to me to come up with the words. Damn, it's really tough, actually. Try it. Have a look around where you are now and try to come up with a word for something that you can see in the room that starts with the letter 'A', then 'B', and so on.

Maybe you can do it easily, but it's tough for me. I end up having to look at each thing, find the name for it, then the first letter and check for a match. It's tedious. My memory of words is just not set up that way, it's not indexed by starting letter. I have a large vocabulary, thanks to my writing, but it's all indexed by definition. Then cross referenced with synonyms so that I can avoid using the same word twice in the same sentence. A big no no. ;-)

Still. it worries me when I can't get my brain to work the way I want it. First because over the past couple of years I felt my intellect dulling, though physical exercise has helped sharpen it up some. I'm at the very least, more alert. But I can't help feeling that my brain is stiffening up somehow over time. Or even, dare I say it, getting atrophied because I'm not exercising it in as many different ways as I should.

Perhaps it doesn't help that a good friend of mine is like Eeyore about all things mental and seems to find some joy in telling me that, after 30, it's pretty much a slow glide into the mental equivalent of seized up chocolate.

Last night Lori was adamant that I subscribe to the This American Life podcast. She was right, as usual. So I did. She wanted me to hear act four of this show, where the husband in a three person family suffers from a rare disease where his brain literally shrinks. The story is heartbreaking. Particularly when we get to hear clips of the husband and of his young son. While the husband sound pitiful, hearing the son talking about the impending loss of his father is downright heart wrenching.

If I have fear in my life it's that Megan will grow up without me. That's the big reason that I got back into exercise this time around. Two years ago, at the rate I was going, I was looking at a painful forties, a wheelchair fifties, bedridden sixties and an early grave. Thankfully I was able to realize that it wasn't just my own life I was destroying, but a critical part of Lori's and Megan's as well. I love them so much and if I could do only one thing right in this world it would be to do right by them. In some ways I think fatherhood is a lot like democracy, it's not perfect, but the most important that you can do, is just show up, be there, be involved.

Hey, look, I repeated the word 'right' in that sentence in the last paragraph. I need to work on more Sudokus, and start re-indexing my mental dictionary.