I’ve been playing mind games. Not the ‘mess with someone’ variety, but the sharpen your brain variety. Ipads are good for that. I’ve been playing a few like Room and Machinarium, but I am also playing the Hasbro classics Risk and Scrabble. I learned that my brain isn’t as sharp as it was at the ripe old age of 18, but I can still do the complex thinking if I do it in chunks. The key to living as a thinker is thinking. Our society is geared towards limiting our need and opportunity to think, so we as individuals are responsible for taking up the weighty challenge of critical thought. By extending myself to think quite a bit more than I am required to I am undoing a lot of damage and remembering what it feels like to be an intelligent human being.
Don’t get me wrong, what I do as an educator requires intelligence, but what i do daily becomes a pattern and familiar patterns fail to expand and ignite the brain. The key to knowledge is new; expanding the parameters of what your mind is expected to do every day.
Some Thoughts:
1. I struggle to imagine how vast and desolate an abandoned city like Chernobyl must be. Moreover, I am left to wonder how many other abandoned cities we don’t know about.