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I accept the fact that I am getting old, after all I was born in 1935, but I don’t want to accept the fact that my mind is ossifying. I have been exploring new ideas nearly every day in an effort to help humanity have a more abundant relationship with itself. The problem is my own mind is not functioning in the same way it did when I was younger, not as quick unquestionably, and I haven’t played ping pong since 1964, so my game is probably pitiful. However, other qualities have just as unquestionably improved. They are things that I could have become skillful in during those earlier years, but basically didn’t consider important. They are considering ideas, exploring behaviors and cultivating habits which would have been passed over in my twenties, perhaps even in my sixties as too remote to even be given a moment’s thought.

Now is when the ideas surrounding the Black Swan type remote events come into play. Saying something is a rare occurrence and only happens once in ten years would mean to my younger self to ignore the precursors to those types of events and do the thing. Thus flying a jet at about one hundred feet altitude over the wilds of south Texas at five hundred miles an hour seemed like a good idea when I was in my twenties, but doing that for five decades would risk catastrophe many times over, perhaps thousands of times. It would be impossible for me to be here writing this now if I had constantly lived my life at that level of risk.

With thoughts of that type of risk now in my mind I see risks that would result in a crash happening even once in ten years as meaning it would have happened eight times by now, and that is totally unacceptable. Well, I’m not going to get eight times more chances at that level of risk, but it is probable I will get one chance, and possibly two, and even at that level of risk it is unacceptable so I don’t even take it. There are types of risks that I routinely take now that I would have avoided when young, such as talking before a group. I remember hating that when in college, but now talking to a group is little more stressful than talking to a single person. The risk is low and the potential reward is possibly high. On the other hand, when taking the physical risks of my youth, the rewards were low and the risks were high.

So, one of the things I have been doing with my spouse is playing various games while we take our daily constitutional walk. License plate games of making up short sentences out of the letters in a plate, and longer sentences out of words, even sentences, where the next letter begins a new word. It gets easier with some practice. Another game is rhyme n relate, where the second person rhymes with the last word the previous person said and then says a related word, and the first person repeats the sequence. That one isn’t too difficult to learn. Today I came up with a variation, alliterate n antonymize, where the respondent word alliterates the first sound of the previous person’s antonymized word, and then we cycle back and forth. This has proven to be more difficult, at least for me and Debbie, but it is probably a skill that can be learned. The problem comes with an antonym because one must first understand the word being considered, which takes a mental operation, and then reversing the meaning which seems to take more than a single mental operation.

The point of these games is to flex one’s mind and find new patterns spontaneously.