This is my Brain over Fifty

Ever since I hit my fifties, I’ve turned into a different person. Even my hair has changed—it was pin straight for five decades, and now it’s curly. What the absolute what?

Once upon a time I could get two toddlers ready for day care and put on a suit and a full face of make up and make it fifteen miles away to work by 8:30am. These days, with my kids both living several states away, I’m lucky to roll into my office around the corner from my house with clean clothes on by ten a.m.

I don’t know if it’s a function of menopause or just regular aging, but I seem to have lost my talent for object permanence. If something (or, sadly, someone) isn’t right in front of my face, jumping up and down, I’m not entirely convinced it exists. I’ve tried coping mechanisms like writing everything down as soon as it crosses my mind, but then I have to remember what it is I wrote down. I’ll wander around my office sometimes asking things like, “Does anyone know what I meant when I wrote down email SF lady?” Sometimes it comes to me later, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I play an online game every Monday at 11[i], and so I set an alarm for 10:50. Every time the alarm goes off, it surprises me. I have never ever remembered that the game happens on Monday mornings on a Monday morning.

I’ve talked about this with my Friends of a Similar Age, and I’m not alone. We’ve discussed whether or not this is cognitive decline or just exhaustion. Or maybe our brains are full. We’ve been cramming them full of information for so many years that there simply isn’t room for one more fact. I think it’s that when you reach a certain age – and for most of us, that age seems to hover around fifty – you stop caring about most things. And when you don’t care, you simply can’t be bothered coding whatever it is into your short term memory.

I’m not a neuroscientist. So all this is guesswork, and not at all to be taken seriously. But it seems logical to me that it takes a certain amount of energy to code a fact, no matter how small, into your short term memory, even more energy to code it into long term memory. And the older you get, the more you realize that there are so few things that matter and are worth expending that energy for.

As your friends and loved ones start to die off, and you face your mortality by seeing it in those around you, you—or at least I—start to get selfish with your finite amount of energy. I’m not going to waste it on petty nonsense, problems that don’t concern me, or low priority items. Right now? I’m only middle aged if I live to 110, which is highly unlikely because in my direct line the oldest person I’m aware of made it only to 79.

Instead of senility, I’m going to call it mindfulness. I’m living in and for the moment I’m in, experiencing it without the intrusion of five minutes ago or five minutes in the future. This moment, right here, right now, is the only one I know I’ve got, so I’m not going to squander it by not giving it my full attention.

Tomorrow? That’s tomorrow’s problem. And yesterday? I can’t remember it anyway.

 

[i] Yarn bingo at Hobbii. I’ve yet to win. I am terribly unlucky.

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