Brain Gym

I’ve been walking some five to seven miles a day to arrive at a simple truth— exercise matters. I feel more alive and alert, am sleeping better, weight is down. Human beings were made to move and it has been surmised that ancient hunter-gatherers covered about 12 miles a day— without a Fitbit to motivate them, I might add. When we moved into the sedentary activities of offices and schools, the body clamored for our attention. So we used our money earned sitting at desks to buy gym memberships, sat in our car while we drove there, jostled for parking spaces and joined other sweaty bodies indoors riding bikes that went nowhere and working on machines that did nothing to get our food ready or build shelters. However strange and artificial it would appear to those who get their exercise actually working with their body, it is one way to meet the body’s truth: exercise matters.

 

As with the body, so with the mind. The best exercise is rigorous thinking, born from a lifetime of reading, writing and reflection and vigorous discussion. But the ingenuity of humankind has also devised some other kind of brain gyms in the forms of games and puzzles. And so in the luxury of my retired life, some of these have become daily sustenance. A 15-minute solitaire game to exercise the number and pattern mind, a 30- minute crostic to work out the language center, a two-to- four day jigsaw puzzle to awaken the mind tuned to images, colors and shapes. Then there’s Bach and jazz improvisation on the piano, the callisthenic routine to shape and keep in shape organized sound. Numbers, words, sounds, images all given the needed exercise to stay wholly alive, alert, attuned, keeping the brain synapses doing their push-ups. 

 

When people stop exercising their bodies and sink further into the couch of lethargy, sloth and flab and dullness run the day. When people stop exercising their minds, their cerebral couches sag with the weight and the dangerous thoughts of others invade their mental landscape. Alongside the aforementioned rigorous reading, writing and discussing, a steady diet of challenging games and puzzles not only elevates your quality of life, but is a holding action against the coming invasion of dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s. 

Cards, Sudoku puzzles, acrostic books and jigsaw puzzles are cheap, portable, easy to come by and the results are tangible, a big improvement over the rabbit hole of surfing Facebook or going down into the pit of the evening news. In the moment of navigating the intriguing challenges of walking through the maze that eventually reveals meaning, you are God in your kingdom, wholly in charge at your highest level of intelligence, invulnerable to the insanities of others. You emerge ready to face the real game of daily life and deeper thinking with the strings of your brain's synapses buzzing and humming and ready to go back into the fray.

 

Exercising both body and mind is a very good idea. But there's more. If both demand exercise to stay in shape, it stands to reason that the heart could also use a workout program. Stay tuned.