The other morning, I woke up early. That really annoying early…
45 minutes before the alarm goes off. You’re really not ready to make a go of things, especially on a cold winter morning, but by the time you get back to sleep, you’re just going to have to get up. So I lay in bed kind of hoping I would drift back to sleep but suspecting I wouldn’t, and I thought about my to-do list.
Grocery store run, Libby needs new leggings, remember it’s a piano lesson day, we need new checks, have to send that invoice for work today if I want to get paid, etc. When I reached the end, I thought, “It’s going to be a busy day.” An ordinary thought, innocuous enough. Except, when I thought it, a part of me died. Of boredom.
Now, my expectations for original thought in the first hour of the day are not high. And going through a to-do list is just a part of life. Our lives are filled with the day-to-day tasks of living and some of us like to be organized about it. It was my summary of the list, the fact that I labeled the day for myself as “busy,” that killed me.
I worry about my brain, that it’s on a downward trajectory (Point in case, just now I couldn’t remember exactly how to spell trajectory.)
What used to be pregnancy brain, then mommy brain, then sleep deprived brain and stress brain, has now just become my brain. I know we’re supposed to do things to keep our brain healthy, and I do a fair amount of them. But I want to do more with my brain than keep it healthy, I want to keep it entertaining. If I don’t find my own thoughts very interesting, I worry no one else will, including my children and my husband. The end result, I fear, will be me sometime in the future just sitting in a room with my family talking to myself: “Hey, today sure was cold! I don’t think it got above 7 degrees. It was so cold, I couldn’t get everything done on my to-do list.” I really don’t like the sound of future me. Zzzzzzzzz…
I’m realizing that it’s as easy to let your brain “go” as it is your body.
It’s so nice to snuggle up with that bag of M&M’s and bottle of wine on the couch after the kids go to bed. Add in the latest sitcom on tv, and I can rot my brain at the same time I rot my body. The thought of having to start up some kind of brain exercise routine on top of my regular exercise routine makes me cringe. But the fact remains that my brain is getting flabby. It’s a little like I’m trying to shove it into jeans that just don’t fit anymore; I don’t like the way my brain feels these days.
So here is the list of things I’m going to do to work my brain a little more:
- 2016 Reading Challenge My friend Laura tagged a bunch of us on FB with this at the beginning of the year, and I’m so psyched she did. I love to read but have a serious junk book tendency. I like how this challenge is open to my own interests while still pushing me out of my usual comfort zone. Smell the caffeine, brain?
- I re-ordered The New Yorker. When Nell was three or four, my husband and I realized we had an enormous stack of New Yorkers lying unread around the house, so I canceled the subscription because they made me feel like a loser. The kids are older now though and I have high hopes of finishing two or three articles a week. You hear me, head? Two to three articles a week and not just the cartoons!
- I’m going to see more plays. I am a playwright, and I love to see live theatre. This is another one of those things that I let go when the kids were younger. There was always some reason not to go… My brain needs this kind of stimulation though if I’m to be allowed in polite company in the future. Priorities, brain, priorities!
You’ll notice I’m not going back to school, I’m not learning a foreign language, and I’m not watching Kahn Academy videos on calculus (though here you go if that’s your thing!). I’m not trying to bench press a hundred pounds at the beginning of my new routine. These are all things that I like, that I used to do on a regular basis before I had kids, and that I somehow let go. I figure that if I started with something overly ambitious, if I tried working the New York Times crossword puzzles (What the heck is a three letter word for, “That guy”?) for example, that I’d just give up when it started to get hard and go back to my mushy brain ways. My goal is to get more ambitious in time, but for now, this works for me.
