I pride myself on doing something every day to exercise my brain. (I am not-so-secretly terrified of Alzheimer's). So, I try to mentally challenge myself with something every day.
Yesterday I received a wake-up call and discovered just how out of shape my brain is! I tried to tutor a neighbor in Algebra II. At first all went well. I felt we were making progress. After an hour or so, my brain couldn't keep up. It started tiring and feeling sluggish. Then I started making stupid errors. By the third hour I couldn't think anymore and couldn't figure out simple problems.
Yikes! My brain has no endurance anymore! My daily brain sprints have not prepared me for a brain marathon! It was embarrassing how I've let my brain go!
There was a time in life when I could attend 4-6 hours of classes, work, and still spend hours studying or writing papers. Oh, those glory days might be gone forever!
What are you unable to do today that you could do 10 or 20 years ago?
4 weeks ago
ive never been able to do algebra. i dread the day when my own kids take it.
ReplyDelete15 yrs ago i cold eat 2 cinnabuns a day and be a size 2. not able to do that anymore. but if i could-we never would have met. so i guess my metabloism is to blame for us meeting!
"That neighbor" said you helped him so much, so don't be too hard on yourself. Look at how many years you have been out of school, and you still remember how to do Algerbra! I had to look up how to spell it!:) You should be patting youself on the back.
ReplyDelete20 years ago, those were the days of pulling all-nighters and being able to recover in a day, not a week, running 5 to 10 miles a day and feeling good about it the next day ready to start over, not letting the stresses of life get to me, the ability to let things roll off my shoulders instead of letting them weigh me down to where I felt like I couldn't breath. You say the glory days might be over forever. I think we just need to find different glory days. Raising a family, developing new skills, relizing maybe we can't do it all and it's still okay! Laughing at ourselves and laughing with our kids, gaining life experiences and trying hard to stay ahead of the game of life so we don't get swallowed up by the things that don't really matter. Sorry for the lengthy response. I guess I need to ask myself what can I do today that I couldn't do 15 to 20 years ago? That seems less depressing:)
Karen