My Aunt Georgie was the kind of woman who made you feel like you were falling behind no matter how old you were, and I mean that in the best possible way. She was sharp. Not sharp for her age, not sharp considering the circumstances, just sharp, the kind of mind that stayed engaged with the world long past the point where a lot of people check out and start watching the clock wind down. And I watched her, really watched her over decades, and what I saw was someone who had made a deliberate choice about how to live, and the choice was this: never stop.
She read constantly. She engaged with people. She asked questions that weren’t polite small talk but actual curiosity about how things worked and why. She didn’t sit in a chair and wait for the world to come to her. She went after it, every day, with the kind of intention that most people reserve for their twenties and then gradually let go of as the decades pile up. And here’s what I noticed, and it took me years to fully articulate it. She wasn’t staying sharp because she was naturally gifted or genetically lucky. She was staying sharp because she practiced it. Every single day. Like a muscle she refused to let atrophy.
She’s the reason I play Sudoku every morning. Not because I particularly love number puzzles, though I do find a certain satisfaction in them, but because she taught me, through example more than words, that the mind needs exercise the same way the body does, and if you let it go idle it will go idle, and getting it back once it’s gone is a lot harder than maintaining it while you have it. And so every morning, before I do anything else, before coffee, before email, before the day starts its assault on my attention, I sit down with a Sudoku puzzle and I make my brain work. It’s a practice. A discipline. A small daily investment in the organ that makes everything else possible.
You know, I stopped playing Solitaire on the PC at some point, and the reason is connected to what Aunt Georgie taught me about the difference between mental exercise and mental avoidance. Solitaire feels like you’re doing something. It has the shape of a puzzle. But it doesn’t actually challenge anything after the first few games. Your brain solves it on autopilot while you’re really just occupying time, and occupying time is the opposite of what she was doing. She was engaging time. Using it. Making it work for her. And that distinction, between activities that exercise the mind and activities that merely occupy it, has become one of the most important filters in my daily life.
I think about her now more than I used to, partly because I’m at the age where staying sharp stops being theoretical and starts being urgent, and partly because I see the alternative playing out in people around me. People who retired and stopped. People who achieved what they wanted to achieve and decided they were done. People who gradually let go of curiosity and challenge and engagement, not all at once but in small daily surrenders, and then one day they look up and the sharpness is gone and they can’t remember when it left because they weren’t paying attention when it happened.
When you stop learning, you start dying. That’s not a bumper sticker. That’s a biological reality that my Aunt Georgie understood in her bones, and she lived accordingly, and she stayed sharp until the very end, and I intend to do the same thing, one Sudoku puzzle at a time, one book at a time, one conversation at a time, because the alternative is sitting in a chair and watching the world happen to other people, and I’m not ready to be there yet. Not even close.
