They say you need to keep your brains active if you don’t want to lose them.
I don’t know how much of “they say” shit is true or not. I know people who died early and did everything right, and people who died later in life but, smoked and drank and carried on. I know people whose mind left and yet, they had been smart and curious, with an active mind, until it went, and I know people who are dull to this day.
So, for the most part, what “they say” doesn’t matter. We are all an experiment of one.
What you do may or may not matter in the long run. What makes up the journey of our life, is what counts for me.
Are you comfortable, do you feel good and do good? Are you depressed or mean spirited? These are the questions I like to answer as a form of measurement. I want to be nice in this world for as long as I can, and I’d like to feel as good as I can, (and still eat cookies) quality is more important to me than quantity.
If I have a good day, a good week, a good month, a good year and repeat often enough — chances are I will have a pretty good life when it comes time to look back on it. (so far, so good.)
So, to make those good days add up, I do shit. I do shit that make me think I am doing good things for the long run, to keep my health both physically and mentally.
My dad had his mind in the end but, his body failed him, his wife, the opposite.
Dad really liked to play mind games. (in more ways than one) But the games I’m talking about were the ones he thought might keep his brain fit.
He like to test his memory. He would name all the states and their capitols, he would call out the bones in the body, or recite a poem he learned in school.
One of his favourite games was to pick a letter and see how many words he could say that began with that letter in say, 30 seconds.
I was impressed how well he did each time he challenged me to the game.
So, as I was thinking of today’s writing and the letter F, I started thinking of how many F words I knew. Using Dad’s strategy to start with the body when looking for words, I set the timer.
Foot, foreskin, fingers, forearm, face, forehead, face, femur, follicles, feet, feelings, frank, fraud, fact, fiction, factory, fresco, fresca, forsythia, fun, funny, fox, fascinating, freak, free, fantastic!
It’s only fun if you play!
ugh. I admit to having read your list before doing my own.
frank, frivolous, fuck, fudge, fascinate, freak, frankly, fickle, folicle, fist, fart, finger, flood
the 30 seconds goes by so fast… doh… fast would have been good.
I can’t believe I didn’t come up with fart! 🙂
fenestrate!
At St. Vincent’s Hospital we once had a patient (a baby) who’s first and last name started with “F” so for many shifts we documented in our nurses notes along the lines of
“Fara Farmer (name changed due to HIPAA) found fussing. Fed formula by father…”
It was fun.