by Gerard Coulombe

Created on: July 04, 2009

You are about to read an article about why Seniors should write to add years to their lives. It's a piece about the importance of writing as an exercise that could help to keep the mind elastic and useful for as long as possible. This in actuality is a self-help article that suggests that a senior who writes every day is less likely to slide even gracefully into forgetting as frequently as seems to be the case. It is meant also to suggest that as Seniors, we have an awful lot to say and there are at times few willing listeners, although thankfully, there are some who are politely attentive as we recall memories rarely told or even, we thought, forgotten. Young people are so much quicker than most of us Senior are. In the time it took to write this piece to a title that first initiated it, and a reply about a need to revise the title and it going "live" on Helium, someone else came up with a piece. It's not all a mind thing, one knows that, it's this Internet thing and computers that boggles some of our minds. You see, for Seniors, for many, at least, it's all about remaining alert, mentally. Not an easy task anymore. There are, already, chinks in the brain's armor.

This piece is not for anybody other than Senior Citizens to read. It's for seniors to read and reflect upon and then to write on any topic we desire to write about. Many of us enjoy doing crossword puzzles and picture puzzles for all the many years we have done them already. We may or may not know that the time and work we put in doing puzzles has added years to our lives. We do crossword and picture puzzles to keep occupied, but we really know that by doing puzzles, our mind is working, our mind is stretched, exercised often to its limits and what we really want is to give our mind a good physical workout so that it will be healthy and functional for us to use in our every day life. The "Back Story" page of Newsweek for June 22, 2009, has an interesting graph entitled, "Can You Cheat Death" and subtitled, "No, but you can negotiate." What we seniors are doing is negotiating a postponement of the body's slow deterioration and that of the mind. What we seniors all seek to avoid or should at least work at postponing is the slow deterioration of a healthy, functional mind. Maybe what we have aging with the body is a mind that is not as sharp as a tack, not quite as responsive with the immediacy and elasticity of recall that we have been used to in our own minds, but a mind, nevertheless, that

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