Anxiety and A Forgetting

 

 

It has been found that people who have been anxious personalities most of their lives and have a hard time focusing, will age intellectually and memory will decline more quickly than those who have not.  This is a scary thing for me because I have always been an anxious person. 

I have been a hard-working person and I am organized, and have learned to find solutions to problems quickly.  It made me successful at my job that I could make decisions on the fly.  I am a creative personality and have creative thoughts throughout the ay, and, sometimes, even during the night.   I find that doing art is a means to experience meditation and prayer in action as I work intuitively and sink into that space and place of calm, peace, and spontaneity.  I have been this way since my earliest of memories and is all part of my personality that I have developed more and more as I have aged.  This should all be something that will keep my mind sharp.

It is so sad to see elderly women lose the ability to tell their stories.  I watched my mother sink into ‘forgetting’.  She had been a school teacher all her life, was very intelligent, but, was a sad personality.  All my life, I sensed this sadness, and, as I became an adult, I understood where much of it came from.  She had had so many losses in life, had given service to her parents and family rather than marry and have children.  She married late in life to a much older man.  My parents loved each other, but I do not ever remember there being a ‘passion’.  I never saw my father kiss my mother until she was taken to emergency with a heart attack.  I was 17 years old and had never seen them kiss or even hold hands.  She made her life beautiful in other ways.  Her acre of flower garden was award winning in our small town.  She could make fancy desserts.  Hr handwork was second t none.  Se was a dedicated mother, a choice mother, and I am a grateful daughter that she told us her stories all our lives with her… until... her stories were gone and I keep alive what ones I heard and encourage my children to share their stories of “grandma”.  She reminds me how important it is to share our stories…before, we, too, might lose them.

Are you an anxious person?  Did you realize that allowing yourself to be an anxious person can influence earlier onset of ‘forgetting’?  What do you think we can do to refuse to live an anxious life? 

©Carol Desjarlais 5.10.22