About Your Mind

You know every phone number by heart. Your parents, your friends, the office, the pizza place on the corner. You know the lyrics to every song on the radio. You win trivia competitions because your mind holds everything.

That changes. I want you to know that.

At first you rationalize. Cell phones came along. Who needs to remember numbers anymore? The lyrics do not matter. The trivia is just trivia. Irrelevant facts falling away because they are no longer needed. The mind is efficient. It lets go of what it does not use.

Then you start forgetting things that are not irrelevant.

The five things you were supposed to do today. The two small things your wife asked you this morning. The follow-up you promised. The appointment you made. You tell yourself you will remember. You do not remember. You try lists but lists are not your thing. You have never needed lists. Your mind was the list.

The annoying thing is that it is not consistent. Some days you are sharp. Focused. Insanely productive. You write for hours. You hold ten threads at once. You think: I am fine. I was worrying about nothing.

Then the fog comes. You sit down to work and you cannot find the thought. You read the same paragraph three times. Your wife asks if you called the doctor and you did not call the doctor and you do not remember that you were supposed to call the doctor. She looks at you. You see something in her face. You do not want to name what you see.

I will get tested. Eventually. When I remember to make the appointment. That is the joke I tell myself. It is not funny.

We both know what the answer will be. Cognitive decline. It creeps up on you. It does not announce itself. It just takes small things, one at a time, until you notice that the small things have accumulated into something larger.

Yes it scares me. No I do not know how to cope with it. Yes I am doing the things they say to do. The vitamins. The puzzles. The writing. The walking. The fish oil and the blueberries and the crossword and the articles I make myself finish. I do not know if any of it helps. I do it anyway because doing nothing is worse.

Here is what I want to tell you:

If there is someone older in your life, someone who knows things, someone who has been where you are going, get to them now. Do not wait. Do not assume they will be there when you are ready. I am not vanishing tomorrow. But I am, a little, in a way I cannot stop.

I mentored people for years. I still have things to say. But the window is not infinite. The periods of lucidity are still there, still frequent, still real. Someday they will not be. I cannot tell you when. Neither can anyone else.

You cannot prepare for this. I do not think you can. Maybe someone will discover a drug that reverses it. Maybe something in the pipeline will change everything. But you cannot plan a life on a hope and a prayer. You can only live in the mind you have today and do what you can with it while you can.

You are young. Your mind holds everything. Phone numbers, lyrics, trivia, the small things your wife asked you this morning. You do not know what a gift that is.

I did not know either.

Use it. Use it now. Ask the questions. Do the work. Have the conversations. Build the things you want to build. Not because time is running out. Time is always running out. But because the mind you have today is not the mind you will have forever, and you do not get to choose when it starts to change.

I am writing this on a clear day. Tomorrow might be fog. I do not know.

But today I remember your name. Today I can still do this.

That has to be enough.