There’s a notebook by the kettle now — cheap, spiral-bound, the sort you’d use for a shopping list — except this one has spent the last fortnight logging every time my brain either lost something it should have kept, or found something faster than it had any right to.
I started it the week I stood in my own kitchen hunting for the word for the thing you use to strain pasta, circling it for what felt like a geological age — “the bowl with holes,” “the sieve’s cousin,” “the thing” — before “colander” finally surfaced from wherever it had been hiding, and decided I’d rather have data than dread.
My brain at sixty-eight is not the brain I had at thirty-seven, and for the longest time I treated that fact the way you’d treat a leak below the waterline — something to be monitored anxiously rather than simply understood.
What nobody explains, when they hand you the standard warnings about ageing and memory, is that the same week I couldn’t find “colander,” I solved, in under a minute, a problem with the guttering that had defeated a younger, quicker version of me for the better part of a decade — because the younger version kept trying to fix it with force, and the older version simply looked at it properly first.
I’ve come to think of this as an editing process rather than a decline, which is either genuinely true or an extremely convenient story I’ve told myself to avoid feeling too much like a leaking hull. The manuscript gets shorter. Entire chapters — the capacity to stay awake past eleven for no particular reason, the ability to argue a losing point purely for sport — have simply been cut. What’s left, though, reads better than the first draft did. I no longer waste four hours worrying about things that resolve themselves. I no longer need to win a conversation to feel I’ve contributed to it. Forty years at sea taught me to read weather; the last few years seem to have taught me to read people and situations with something closer to the same instinct, arrived at considerably faster than it used to take.
The bit that actually startled me — properly startled me, not the gentle low-level unease of misplaced vocabulary — was noticing that I now solve certain problems before I’ve consciously started thinking about them. A decision that would once have needed a walk, a notebook, and several days of chewing it over now sometimes just arrives, fully formed, while I’m doing something else entirely. I mentioned this to a former colleague, still working, who looked faintly alarmed and asked whether I’d had it checked out. I had to explain, with as much dignity as I could manage, that no, I was fairly sure this one was a feature and not a fault, though I appreciated the concern.
The manuscript is shorter. The sentences, I’ve started to suspect, are actually better. That’s not a phrase I’d have trusted a year ago — it sounded too much like the sort of thing people say to make ageing sound bearable rather than because it’s demonstrably true. But I’ve started keeping a rough tally, privately, of the times a fast, near-instant judgement of mine turns out to have been right versus the times a long, careful, thirty-seven-year-old-brain-style deliberation would have served me better. The instant judgements are winning, and I don’t entirely know what to do with that information yet, other than trust it slightly more than I used to and mention it to precisely nobody at the pub, in case it comes across as boasting about a brain that also, this week, forgot the word for colander.
If you want the fuller argument for why the slower parts of a retired brain might be the least interesting thing about it, I put together a longer guide on the subject — Retiring From Nonsense: A Practical Guide to Stoicism for the Over 60s: https://greythinker.gumroad.com/l/stoic. It’s not really about memory. It’s about which thoughts are worth keeping.
What I haven’t told you yet is what happened when I actually tested this theory properly — sat myself down with an old logbook and a stopwatch and tried to catch my own brain in the act, on purpose, over a fortnight — and the results didn’t entirely agree with the flattering story I’d just told you above.
⬇️ Keep reading below for the fortnight I spent testing my own brain, and the one place the “editing, not decline” theory turned out to be flatly wrong.
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