Mind Prods

Senior and retired.  Every day a stream of challenges, mostly imposed upon me.  In grade school somebody else set the curriculum and I complied.  Once college arrived I had some discretion of what I wanted to study.  There were classes, there were social encounters.  Come medical school the curriculum was again mostly imposed but rigorous, challenging me most waking hours.  Then residency and career, some forty years of this, with patients in a continuous stream needing guidance, often me needing to learn more from either consultants or study.  Retirement resets that.  There are no mental imperatives other than what I create.  So what have I created?

Not a trivial undertaking.  I still keep a subscription to my favorite medical journal and read two articles from it each week.  I subscribe to The Atlantic and The Forward, reading one article a day from the former, two from the latter, and making an effort to comment to the author.  As much as I generally detest Twitter, this seems the most expeditious platform for feedback, though private emails to authors often get a response.  For a long time I had to produce a column for Medscape each month.  Not being personally within the medical loop, the quality of my submissions waned so I gave it up.  I do not have a substitute.  Still, I have maintained furrydoc.com, striving for a submission each day, irrespective of whether anyone reads my comments.  They are still personal expressions.  

I make an effort to watch a TED talk each day, and do pretty well with this.  A reading quota used to appear on my semi-annual projects list.  I dropped this initiative, as I was already doing it without having to target it for special attention.  Three books every half-year, one audio, one e-book, one traditional with subjects distributed over fiction, non-fiction, and Jewish.  Two months into this cycle, I've done two e-books, fiction and Jewish.  

My day starts with crosswords.  I enjoy doing them, though I'm not particularly adept.  I could try to get more proficient by either looking up clues, which I regard as cheating though it's probably really educational, or looking up and studying the final answer to the clues I missed.  But right now, I think just the recreational element of thinking what the letters should be will suffice.

Each school term, I take courses at the Osher Institute, usually four, usually lecture format.  I used to like to take discussion style classes but those have become less available since the pandemic.

And each Monday evening I make a YouTube video where my talking head discusses a topic for about seven minutes.

While I've done well with petty expression, what I've not done well, indeed underperformed, has been replacing that monthly Medscape column with presentations of comparable length requiring comparable effort that others may want to read.  I try, but have been inconsistent with output.  It's one thing to sit through lectures or read articles of other people's minds, quite another to create my own.  As valuable as being part of the audience has been, I need to focus more effectively as a content creator.  That's where this set of semi-annual projects directs me.  Good attempts.  Not good consistency.  Focus on this.  My senior mind depends on it.