Open Writing

Now’s a good time. To do a little overdue painting, rust-scraping, patch plastering -- whatever’s needed to get the old domicile ready for another active year. The domicile you carry around with you, I mean. Your body, your mind, your memory, your motor skills. Your accumulated knowledge of your place and time.

All that stuff the real you inside has worked with, and lived with, and improved and maybe worn out or mistreated, too, over the last however many years and miles you’ve traveled through space and time.

Of course, advice is easier to give than to take. If I’d always followed my own advice, who knows where I’d be now?

Medical health

If you’ve taught your personal space travel machine to use a computer, even for the most rudimentary tasks, you might want to use these jumping off places to get some ideas.

http://www.witham.org/subpages/healthlibrary/healthlibrary.htm

That’s Witham Hospital’s Health Library page. It’s a gateway to a number of other gateways. Like the National Institute of Health, Harvard School of Medicine, the Mayo Clinic, and many others.

There are also many local and Internet places to look for information and inspiration. Look around. You’ll find them. Affordable and often free.

Mental health

The first hurdle here is to admit you might need some skilled advice or assistance. If we were all as smart and well balanced as we think we are, there’d be little need for schools, dictionaries, encyclopedias or manuals. But face it. Even rocket scientists are not rocket scientists in the mental health area. And your mental difficulties might be part of your physical problems. Or vice versa.

Don’t be embarrassed to ask for help. Or listen without blowing sky-high if someone suggests you might need it. They could be right.

Social health

Man is not a solitary animal. You might think of exceptions, but were they really happy, healthy, productive people?

If you spend every day at your workstation or in your cubicle, or watching the daytime TV shows from your retirement room, you will sooner or later evaporate. The ‘you’ which is in there somewhere will keep getting smaller and duller and less able to think or change until it just fades away to nothing.

Join a club. Volunteer at the hospital. Spend some time at the library reading provocative magazines. Write letters to the editor. Spend afternoon comparison-shopping chain saws. So what if you live on the 12th floor of an apartment building. How do they know, maybe you are planning to buy a hunting lodge in Manitoba. If the store detectives think you’re a robber, you might get to meet some interesting security people, or that cute little red-headed beat cop you’ve been eyeing, you dirty old man. Probably learn she can have you hog-tied, handcuffed, and branded on the left hind leg in ten seconds flat.

But it’s a way to get acquainted.

Handwriting

Now that’s something I’ve never seen mentioned by givers of good advice like me. But probably plenty of them need to work on it. I sure do. Even when I was in grade school and forced by cruel adults to spend a certain amount of time each day practicing, my handwriting was barely legible.

Now that I’ve been retired for several years, and have been introduced to computer keyboards, about the only thing I ever write is my signature. And maybe a garbled phone note for my spouse.

It would be good if I would grab myself by the shirt collar and say, “SELF! ARE YOU LISTENING? DON’T MAKE ME SAY ANYTHING PROFANE. Promise me that you will spend 30 minutes a day in walking or aerobic exercise, and another fifteen minutes of steadily writing in longhand.”

I can talk to me like that. He seldom pays much attention anyway. But maybe he’ll be emboldened to write a letter to Uncle Fud once in a while. Or write down his recipe for tennis shoe stew.

Could be some day I’ll be able to write a whole five-item shopping list and still be able to read it when I get to the store.