Brain games

March 27th, 2012 by Jan

There are very few computer games I play. But with Ken away, I find playing a quick game of suduko or solitaire not boring. And each day I practice math with flash cards. The math practice is futile — numbers are just jumble squiggles to me. In the end, I usually just look up the answers. I suppose that is cheating, but I don’t seem to mind.

I just started playing a Hangman game. You know the game with — — — — —, you guess letters and see if you can figure out the word before a stickman is hung and dies. Probably a grade 3 game. At first I couldn’t get any of the words and my guy was dying every time. But I persevered. I have a system, first I guess vowels, A, O, E, I and U in this order. (I never guess Y) Then M, N, S, T, R, B, D, F…. If the guy hangs, so be it.

Then it dawned on me that these are not games of chance. They have nothing to do with luck. So I put one letter up and I stopped and looked at the seven blank spaces with A as the second letter. I started thinking, making my brain work.

I know this sounds so bizarre, ridiculous and even a bit embarrassing to admit, but I struggle with numbers and letters. I find it hard to stay focused.

So I stared — old habits die hard. My thoughts jumped around and mostly landed on, “I don’t know.”  I kept looking and guessed G. (Okay, I guessed, but it was a thoughtful guess and different from my habit.) Then I just looked and thought about it. __A__ __ __ __G.

In AA they say, “Your best thinking got you there.” And so they encourage newcomers to not think… “just listen and work the steps.” The idea (I think) is that your can’t think yourself out of addiction, you have to take action. But, boy oh boy, I can tell you if I had stopped to think at different times in my life… well, it would have been better.

The distance from heart to head is not all that far, and though we might find more comfort moving from head to heart or heart to head; it’s not a one way street. I need to traveled in both directions. I want to nourish my feelings, and need to regulate, not ignore, my thinking process.

ADD, dyslexia, addiction, are struggles. But letting go of an old story… there’s the real battle.

Oh and, FYI… my guy didn’t hang! SAPLING

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