What Actually Keeps a Mind Sharp...

Attention, reality, and the difference between stimulation and perception.

Hello and welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what actually keeps a mind sharp.

Not memory games or brain-training apps.

Something else.

I notice it in the difference between how my mind feels after twenty minutes of scrolling and how it feels after an hour with a difficult book.

Both involve attention.

But they leave behind very different kinds of minds.

Recently, I removed social media apps from my phone.

I realised that every time I sat down for a break, I instantly picked up my phone and started scrolling.

The algorithm had heard me and was feeding me countless influencers explaining how to exercise to fix my osteoporosis.

Valuable information.

Utter overwhelm.

It’s how the algorithm works.

Endless:

3 ways to do this.

4 steps to improve that.

Small bites individually.

Brain scrambling when they arrive together in a scroll.

I just want to see my friends’ and family’s posts, which are now buried under a mountain of irrelevant nonsense. I have to go to their specific account to see what they are doing.

I also deleted 14GB of videos from YouTube. It was quite a collection—so many saved items that I never seemed to get back to.

Drowning in information.

I’ve started to sense the sharp distinction between mind-numbing entertainment and reality. For example:

The Piano UK (and Australia) celebrates ordinary people with extraordinary talent and connection to the piano. Some are great pianists, but there are some who simply reach in and touch our souls.

We could watch this show, shed some tears and move on with our day.

But paying attention sometimes means stopping long enough to sense the difference between what is deeply real,

what is merely performative,

and what is simply noise.

I am tired of allowing others to filter the world for me.

I want to notice what is deeply real for me and connect without assistance.

Right now, I sit on my front deck, coffee in hand, loving the sunshine between incessant rain showers, writing. I pause to watch our bees fly in and then fly out of the hive before turning left onto their well-worn flight path. I wonder how they keep going in the rain—how far do they have to go for nectar at this time of year? I am fascinated by the little dance they perform at the entrance to the hive to efficiently direct their fellow bees to the best nectar. Bees inspire curiosity and awe in spades if we stop long enough to notice.

I find myself sitting and writing these sorts of mundane scenes more often. It’s my practice of connecting with what is real.

In addition, I now read writers who challenge my ability to pay attention, adding layers of interest to what I see and how I see it.

Extreme attention is what constitutes man’s creative faculty ... The amount of creative genius in an era is rigorously proportional to the amount of extreme attention…

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.

I want to take a sentence and notice it in my world.

I want to see how patterns of different ideas collide to build stronger and deeper perspectives.

I want to be able to hold different ideas without collapsing them into simplicity.

I want to see and write what is actually there.

I want to see rather than just look.

Perhaps sharpness has less to do with consuming more information

and more to do with learning to pay deeper attention to what is already here.

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