My first story on Medium

I have enjoyed the use of Medium and have been considering how to contribute into this excellent knowledge sharing facility. But I kept thinking of writing a series of articles (based on something I have written previously, or my job, or my past) and procrastinating at the same time.

So I’ve decided to drop that and just write. And I would encourgae new Medium writers to do the same. Put the stuff that really matter in your head and just start writing.

Lately, I am finding that I am slower to recall names and stuffs that I used to be able to recall effortlessly. Now, I might have to ponder a while before I finally can recall a word, a name (of person or object) an event (something that happened a few years ago), and it starts to bother me.

I am in my mid fifties, and I do not wish to live my next 20 or 30 years similar to my mum (who’s no longer with us), whom had Alzeimer’s Disease in her 50s (together with other diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure that I am also suffering from). And it’s not just memory that seems to be deteriorating. My sports, my speed, my dexterity, my hearing, etc., all seems to be going down the drain slowly. So after some thinking, I postulate that all these abilities are related to how our neurology (sensing and brain) works and they all suffer from over use or exposure. They work well with repeated patterns and as they age (over exposure), they tend to not be able to distinguish finer details with repeated patterns and appearances, and I believe that’s where they start to fail.

Let me provide an example. Let’s say you need to fill a water bottle every day. You start with unscrewing the cap, wash the bottle by rinsing water from the tap, then fill new water in the water bottle. While filling the bottle with new tap water, you then wash the cap. And usually the filling takes longer than washing the cap, so you have to wait. And at that time, you might try to do something else while you are waiting for the water to be filled. That’s where suddenly, you realized you are not sure whether you have washed the cap. Because the cap is exactly where you placed beside the sink where you were washing the bottle, just like yesterday, and weeks ago.

When I was younger, I would not ponder the slightest bit to think whether I have washed the cap. I would just know. But now, I am not sure. Now I will wash the cap again, just to be sure. But this happens again, the next day, and some day next week.

So, I think our memory and sensing deteriorates in its performance over excessive replications. We don’t learn new things when we are too familiar with the things we do. Our memory and sensing does not flag out something that occurs too many times. So I have decided to introduce a new step or different step in my habit of washing. And it seems to work now. What I have done is when opening the water bottle initially, I also open the cap (this water bottle cap has an opening that needs to be pried open in order to drink from the cap) and leave it open while filling the water bottle. And when I finished washing the cap, I close its opening.

That solves my water bottle washing issue. And I think the underlying nature of this deterioration applies to the other capabilities we have (fitness, hearing, memory, etc.). And so I have decided to not only do many things I have done in my youth or younger days, but also introduce new things in them. I think if we want to age slowly and have more graceful degration in our abilities, we need to continuously hone our capabilities and introduce newness in them.

Hope this is an interesting observation for you.

- JT -