(Brain) Food for Thought

Jun 192018
 

I am back in physical therapy for the stubborn left shoulder that won’t fully heal following surgery. My therapist has given me a series of targeted exercises. Some are repeats of those I did after surgery last year; some are new. All will go into a folder marked “shoulder,” which sits within a larger folder called “PT.” In there are also maneuvers for hip, ankle, and lower back. These are presented in drawings, photographs, and instructions for at least thirty distinct exercises.

cluttered brainI don’t take this folder to the gym, of course. Instead, I’ve tried to memorize every one of these, with limited success. After all, I also need to remember to do them every day–and to sit up, stand up, lift my head up, roll my shoulders back, pick up my feet—in short, apply my brain to the conscious maintenance of a body challenged by the passing of time.

My brain has other things to do as well: rewrite the first half of my new novel by the end of the month, walk and feed my dog, take out the garbage, plug in and check on the basement dehumidifier, pick up a prescription, arrange for a ride to the airport, prepare to present in front of a book club, take my vitamins. This while I’m trying to remember where I put my iPad or what I went upstairs to fetch.

I have an online calendar for the important appointments that the Cloud shares with my devices. I also make lists. If I start more than one, something I almost always do, I must remember to blend the two and compare them with whatever I’ve written online. I suppose I could have Alexa or Siri or Gaga (my name for Google Assistant) remind me but I don’t yet trust technology to make distinctions between “buy fence for back garden” and “buy plastic border for front garden.”

It’s a lot to ask of an aging intelligence—or is it?

Research about the older brain has been a roller coaster ride of good and bad news for at brain cellsleast forty years, according to an article in Newsweek that summarized more recent findings. In September of 2016, Harvard Health Publishing wrote that although we naturally lose brain cells as we age, we can grow new ones. Then, in March of this year, research published in the journal Nature indicated scientists could find no new neurons in adult brains. The next month, Cell Stem Cell published a study showing that we can potentially continue to make neurons in the hippo-campus until we’re almost eighty. The factors include the aforementioned exercise, a healthy lifestyle, enriched environment, and social interactions.

As to the last, the National Institute on Aging says “Social relationships are consistently associated with bio-markers of health.” They are also the hardest to maintain, owing to the natural isolation seniors encounter. Absent meaningful work and/or close family, struggling with mobility issues and grappling with feelings of purposelessness and irrelevance, older people find it challenging to build or keep relationships.

I’ve got the exercise and healthy lifestyle down, thanks to a dog and a bike. I consider books and engagement with arts and politics to enrich my environment, not to mention the lovely home I’m fortunate enough to own. Social interactions are trickier. I’m a widow engaged primarily in solo endeavors like writing, which means I’m constantly out of practice. While I am expressive and articulate on paper and, I hope, online, I’m far more introverted than most people realize.

Without a doubt, though, socialization is probably the single most effective antidote to friend in kicklinepain and depression I’ve ever encountered. I recently spent two days in the company of a group of wonderful women I first met online. I walked miles and forgot about my aching shoulder, back, hip, etc. We ate and drank and laughed and hugged. I’m still riding the afterglow.

What this suggests is I have even more to add to my to-do list. Somewhere between  “schedule doctor” and “buy paper towels” and “finish chapter three,” I need to remind myself to text or email or message or call a friend and make a plan. It’s not just about maintaining friendships. It’s about strengthening your brain.

Relevance

Feb 232016
 

Relevance is in. It’s how we measure everything. What’s trending? What’s hot? What earns the clicks, the comments, or the buzz? How does that translate into currency?

I admit I struggle with the concept. Have for years. Who is listening to me? Who is reading what I write? How do I extend my reach? How will I know if I’ve achieved relevance?

The dictionary definition of relevance is “being connected to the matter at hand.” That’s vague enough to induce an anxiety attack. What is the matter at hand? How do we know? How often does it change? Who decides?

We do, “we” being an aggregate. Our impulses, our needs and our desires are reflected in circles of relevanceour comments as well as our purchases. We affect and are affected by everyone else. We participate in and succumb to group-think. Everything we like, buy, rate or consume is quantified and measured. The results are used to determine what is offered to us, whether it’s commentary or the latest must-have thing.

Relevance breaks us out of the pack. Without it, we’re in the back row, out of the loop, powerless, maybe even voiceless.

Products and ideas struggle to be relevant. So do people. Irrelevance feels like invisibility. How many of us have tried to give a speech or teach a class to a roomful of people looking at their smart phones? I played piano bar for many years, which is only marginally less deflating. The job entails soothing without disrupting. The goal is to be ignored. It’s a profoundly disappointing way to entertain.

As Google helpfully points out, “artists and politicians are always worried about their relevance. If they are no longer relevant, they may not keep their job.”

So true. Ask any writer trying to come up with the perfect post-Harry Potter/Divergent/Hunger Games young adult novel. Ask any songwriter trying to come up with the next “Hello”, “Happy” or “Uptown Funk.” Ask any politician in 2016.

It’s not just artists and politicians who feel the pull of relevancy. Everyone worries about being important. At work, relevance becomes all about keeping the company at the leading edge of its field. At home, parents compete with the latest app or social media meme for significance in their children’s lives. It’s hard to be a knowing role model when the Internet provides all the answers.

Although relevancy (like everything else) seems amplified, it’s not a new concept. We want to be connected. We want to feel important. We want to stand up and shout, “Hey, I’m here!” The wealthy often insist on naming rights to buildings. Perhaps they hope their money can help them stay eternally connected. Legacy establishes immortality. The donor is relevant every time someone enters the [Your Name Here] Science Center.

erasing relevanceThe older we get, the less clear we are about how to be relevant or even how or where we might connect to what matters. Children grow up and move away. Spouses and siblings die. We are eased out of jobs and into a life of enforced leisure marked by secret struggles or stretches of isolation.

At some point, it may seem meaningless to think about being relevant. We can’t all be insiders. If our goal is to cast a really wide net of influence, we’re up against impossible odds. Some of us give up. Others continue to push back against obsolescence. What are we doing?

do-i-matterWe’re trying to connect. We want to count or be counted. That’s what it’s all about. Somebody cares, somebody needs us, somebody is listening to us. We want to influence something, no matter how small that something is. That’s what floats our boat, gets us up in the morning, and makes us smile. I matter, you matter; we matter.

I argued in Hope in Small Doses that a life of purpose can just as easily involve sharing information as curing cancer. It’s not the scale; it’s the intent. We can be relevant by being a best-selling author or by being a damn good storyteller. We can shape change by running for office or by spending time with a friend in need. Relevance doesn’t require we compete for prominence unless our goal is to have an effect on the greatest number of people. In which case, we’re out of luck. There’ll always be someone with more followers or more money or more power. The next day or week or year, another person will come along to claim the influence crown.

I’ll be honest: I don’t always find it easy to embrace a more intimate definition of relevance. I’m a writer and I want to reach as many people as possible. That puts me in competition with others also vying for the attention of a public we’re trying to influence, enlighten, educate or entertain. We can’t all be relevant, can we?

Yes, we can: maybe to one or ten instead of a thousand or a million. The challenge is to acknowledge that we are all connected to the matter at hand by virtue of being alive.

Gray Pride

Aug 032015
 

(reposted from July 2014)

Last week I took two Pilates lessons, biked 10 miles, worked in my garden, painted two walls, wrote 6000 words on my new novella, recorded a podcast, drove to the beach, drove to New  York and went out to dinner.

I’m still getting older. . . and now my back hurts.

Getting older, as the popular meme has it, is not for sissies. Of course, advertising agencies are bound and determined to counteract that message with a line of persuasive arguments that taking this or that medicine can restore you to full function and make you content, if not happy with your life.

Ever notice how very slowly the people in those ads are moving? Sure, it beats not moving at all, but that’s setting the bar a little low.

older sophisticated couple

Don’t we wish we could all age like this?

The hardest part about growing older is not physical or mental but social. We live in a youth-oriented society. We pretend otherwise, especially as advertisers are lately realizing it’s the older folks who have the disposable income. This may explain how it is they come up with phrases like “golden years” and hawk cruises for couples and Viagra for gray-haired men and their much younger-looking wives.

But most people in the senior citizen demographic can’t help notice how invisible they become as they age. For women, it’s just north of sixty, for men a little later but eventually, older citizens are just so many short people behind the wheels of large cars. Or as one millennial said of the Who, “They’re just old guys playing soundtracks from TV shows no one watches.”  Now THAT hurts.

“Age is a number,” my (mostly younger) friends like to say. But age is a way to measure how much time you’ve had and how much time you have left. In this country, the former is scarcely honored and the latter induces a panic that fuels both the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Even so, it’s difficult, when you’re looking around, not to notice not being noticed.

Aging in a first world country is a first world problem, if you’re lucky—that is; if you have insurance and someone you can guilt or hire into looking after you in your declining years. Before then, sagging skin, minor aches and a dearth of fashion choices aren’t even close to critical in a world where so many of the very young and very old are so very vulnerable.

Still, I spend a lot of time thinking and it’s pretty hard to avoid thinking about infirmity, loneliness, mortality, and yes, even relevance. One moves from wanting to contribute something (and be recognized for doing so) to hoping not to be too much of a drain. It’s not a fun journey.

This ruminating goes on largely out of sight. I promised myself I would age gracefully, or at least graciously. I mentor, I share, I don’t dwell on the good old days or reflexively disparage “all” young people; heck, I’ve even got friends representing several generations. I take my role as village elder seriously.

Of course, I also promised myself not to get cranky as I get older and I’m having difficulty keeping that promise. It helps that I recognize my bad mood as based less on pain and immobility (yet) than on fear and projection.

There are gilt-tinged nuggets and rays of sunlight in the dismal dreariness of time’s march. I’m generally less stressed, far less competitive (if I ever really was) and (big change) far less concerned with what people think of me. This allows me to render opinions that gain in clarity and conviction what they may have lost in influence or reach.

So while I don’t cry out “Bring it on!” (as if I had a choice in the matter), I am learning to take a quieter sort of satisfaction in the way I’m meeting my new, older self—with a mixture of attention, adjustment and acceptance. It’s not hubris, or if it is, it’s tempered by the humility that comes from understanding the fragile nature of one’s existence.

Still. . . those walls didn’t paint themselves.

Geraldine Doyle, model for WWII "We Can Do It!" poster at age 85.

Geraldine Doyle, model for WWII “We Can Do It!” poster at age 85.

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