Dementia-proof

 

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here in these electronic pages before, but I’ve been thinking about some personal inevitabilities lately. Now that my two daughters attained significant milestones – oldest entering college, youngest entering high school – I’ve been musing about my later years. Specifically, my health.

Now, I’m a bit overweight, but I know how to lose poundage: Keto, walking, and weightlifting. It’s just a question of motivation. Which comes and goes in bursts. I’ve had some other minor dings and dents to the frame, but a trip to the doctors office should take care of those. Nothing major, and nothing to worry about. Since my heart issues a dozen years ago, I’ve been lucky to be fairly healthy.

It’s my mind I’m concerned with. Specifically, keeping it intact. The brutal reality is that I can probably expect 20, maybe 25 more years of lucid thinking before the dueling dance with dementia begins. How to gain a proactive advantage, how to start strengthening the mind, how to prevent senility from gaining a toehold, early or not?

“They” say you need to keep the mind active in your older years. Engaged. Curious. That shouldn’t be a problem for me. I’m curious by nature. Engaged somewhat, depending on my fascination du jour. But what would be the best course of action for me specifically to take?

It should be no surprise to anyone who’s read the Hopper to know that Hopper likes to read. Maybe a little too much, if it can be argued that too much reading is a thing (I’m not sure). So I thought back, meta-like, upon my reading habits.

Read a lot as a kid, but the quantity went down significantly as a teen. In my twenties I was focused on music, friends, partying, that sort of thing, and didn’t read much. Maybe a half-dozen books each year, if that. Then, in my thirties, I started reading again. Re-reading great stuff from my youth, exploring other works of great fiction first-time, and a lot of science, some religion.

My reading took off in my late 30s / early 40s. Broadly – very broadly – speaking, my nonfiction focus was primarily religion and philosophy. Why am I here blah blah blah. Then, curiously, my reading habits morphed into history over the past ten years or so, heavily into history since I turned 50. Still enjoy it, and still read it. Have three WW2 books on deck, a book on the JFK assassination, a book on the Crusades, one on Christopher Columbus, and am looking for definitive works on the Holy Roman Empire and the Great Schism of 1054.

All well and good.

Now, and I know I’ve written about this before, every Fall when that crisp chill gets in the air (happens late September in New Jersey, late November in Texas), I get the itch to investigate some math. Yes, I know I’m weird. But I did go to school for this stuff 30 years ago and continually kick myself for not finishing with it. So the brain conflates the September nip with the first days of school and exciting new classes. I absolutely love chipping away at higher math, whether it’s calc, number theory, transcendental numbers, infinite series, you name it. Truth be told I’m horrible at it and forget half the stuff I learn a few days after I learn it, but it excites me in a “thrill of discovery” sort of way.

I’ve joked about this with the wife, but the idea has somehow crept from the absurd to the practical. When I turn 60 I decided to buy either

A)    The best all-around college math textbook I can find

B)    My calculus textbook from my Seton Hall physics days

C)    Both

and truly, deeply, delve into the mysteries of math and try to completely understand what I learn before I move on to the next concept. This experiment could last a week or it could be my new obsession, like military history has been to me since 2012. I’ll only know when I cross the threshold into my seventh decade.

Good Lord, “seventh decade”! Where does the time go!