Recently a family member asked me for some tips for improving short-term memory. I ended up doing a deeper-than-usual dive into the topic. Some of my findings confirmed what I already knew or suspected, but others caught me by surprise. You know those giant canisters of powder with a picture of a bulging venous bicep on the label? Well, more on that later …
Category: Mental Health Page 2 of 8
My father-in-law is dying. He most likely has only weeks to live. As dying goes, he’s doing it really well, surrounded by loved ones, with good professional home-hospice care. He’s a renowned poet and translator, well respected, loved by hundreds if not thousands of students, ex-students, colleagues, friends, and family. He’s lived a full, uncompromising life, and was lucky enough to fall deeply in love, once again, in the last few months. The house where he’s staying, in the Berkeley hills, has a stupendous view of the bay. He’s cogent, self-aware, and taking on this final challenge with grace, courage, and an open heart.
The situation has made me think about what’s important in life. That’s something I think about a lot, but now more so than ever.
No worries.
Over the past couple months I’ve been maintaining two new lists:
- My problems.
- Things I’m looking forward to.
I update both on a weekly basis, along with progress towards my current goals. The point of the new lists is to get better in touch with aspects of my life that are effecting my emotional state. And to find ways to deal with the former, and enhance/magnify the latter.
Getting older doesn’t automatically make you wiser, but there’s more experience to draw on. One theory suggests that this is why we appear to think more slowly as we age–the dataset is bigger but the processor speed is the same.
Sign me up for cybernetic processor enhancement.
Forties (mid, edging into late) is still youngish, and I feel young, despite more than a few gray whiskers in my beard. As long as I eat my berries, anyway. 100% foraged, either from my backyard or the shelves of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
Here are a few of my hard-earned wisdom nuggets from the last few years, for your entertainment (and possibly +1 to your WIS score).
Our new puppy, a possible #6? We’ll see!
I used to make myself miserable in ways that turned out to be easily fixable. Sometimes it took ten, twenty years to see the obvious and do something about it. But that’s not even exceptionally slow. Many people go through their whole lives suffering huge amounts self-inflicted misery.
Here are the major quality-of-life improvements that have worked for me, so far: