Tuesday morning, half past seven, and the pavement along Elm Street was still wet from the night. I could see my breath. A friend from the walking group was already at the corner by the senior centre, counting heads the way she does, and I had my laces tied double because I learned that the hard way.
We walked the long block past the bakery and back, the way we always do. Three laps is the rule a friend from the walking group set years ago, and nobody argues with her. I used to walk alone, when I first left the hospital, and I would come home and sit at the kitchen table and feel like the day had not quite started. Now I walk with the group, and the day starts on the corner.
I am not going to tell you walking makes you young. It does not. What it does is give your memory somewhere to hang its coat. That is my whole theory, and I have watched it hold up at the pharmacy counter and at the brown-bag table for long enough that I trust it.
Here is what I mean. Memory is not a cupboard you fill. It is more like a path through the garden — the more you walk it, the clearer it stays. Leave it a season and the grass comes in. The old teachers knew this long before we had scanners. There is a whole art of memory that runs back to the Greeks — a fragment called the Dialexis, dated to about 400 BCE, mentions it — and the Romans wrote it down properly in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and in Cicero and Quintilian. Their trick was places and images. You put the thing you wanted to remember in a room in your mind, and you walked through the rooms to find it again. A walk, in other words. They built memory on a route.
That idea never entirely went away. Saint Thomas Aquinas classed the art as a part of Prudence and recommended it for meditating on the virtues. The Dominicans carried it through the Middle Ages. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who worked in China from 1582 until his death in 1610, described the system of places and images in his Treatise on Mnemonics. Simplified versions were still being taught in the 19th century to preachers and after-dinner speakers. And people with extraordinary trained memories still use the same bones of it today — Daniel Tammet used such devices to recite 22,514 digits of pi. I cannot remember where I set my reading glasses, so I take this with some humility.
But the part I keep coming back to is the route. The images had to be striking — the Ad Herennium says we ought to set up images of a kind that adhere longest in memory — and the route had to be walked. What is written down is remembered, I always say, and what is walked is remembered too. The body keeps the path.
So when a friend asks me — and my sister asked me just last month, on the phone from Arizona, worried because she had lost a name mid-sentence — I say this: walk, and walk the same way most days. Not far. The same corner, the same bakery, the same bench. Let the route get boring, because boring is the point. A boring route becomes a rail your thoughts can run along. Then put one small thing on that rail. A friend from the walking group tells me her list for the day while we walk, out loud, three items, and by the second lap she has them. I keep my own version — the names notebook stays at home, but the walk is where I practise what went in it. If you are starting from a chair and not a corner, my note on starting a walking routine after sixty is the gentle version of this same idea.
And walk with somebody if you can. I have watched people at the centre come alive between the first lap and the third, and I do not think it is the fresh air. Company is its own memory aid — the talk keeps the mind turning over, and a friend will hand you back the name you dropped before you even know you dropped it. There is more on that in company and memory after sixty, and it is one of the few things I have seen work on a bad week as well as a good one.
Now, the thing that went wrong, because something always does. Two winters ago I decided I was too busy for the group. I had reviews stacked up, the brown bags coming in faster than I could sort them, and I told myself I would walk on my own, later, when things calmed down. Things did not calm down. They never do. Six weeks went by — I say six weeks because I give any single adjustment a month and a half before I decide — and at the end of it I was sleeping badly, misplacing the paper calendar, and standing in the hall with the blood-pressure cuff in my hand wondering why I had taken it out of the drawer. I had not lost my mind. I had lost my route. It cost me the better part of a season to get the habit back, and the habit came back slower than it left. That is the true cost of stopping: not the weeks you skip, but the weeks it takes to return.
If what I have said so far rings true — if the names slip and the appointments wobble and you want to understand what is usually behind that after sixty, and one steady way to improve it — then after you finish this note, go open the memory slip explainer video and let it walk you through. Make it the next thing you do, before the kettle, before the phone.
Let me tell you what this habit cost me, because people assume it costs plenty and it does not. Good walking shoes, replaced about once a year — mine set me back around sixty, give or take, because I wait for the markdown and I am not proud. A rain jacket I have owned for eleven years, so call that a tiny annual outlay and falling. The group at the centre is free. The names notebook is a dollar at the drugstore. The paper calendar by the phone is less than that. Altogether I reckon the whole arrangement costs me under ninety a year, and most of that is shoes. I spent more than that on cough drops in my last winter at the pharmacy counter, and the cough drops did less.
Compare it to what I used to watch people spend at the counter on things that promised sharpness and delivered a lighter wallet. I will not name them. I never do. But a walked route and a written name have outlasted every bottle I ever rang up.
The test strips. If the worry in your house is about forgetting, do the boring checks first, the way I always say. Look in the medicine cabinet before you look anywhere else — the sleep aid, the allergy tablet taken nightly for years. Check the hearing, because hearing is memory. Write things down. And then walk, most days, same route, with a person if one is handy, on your own if not. The habits that hold memory and clarity are never the dramatic ones. They are the ones you can still be doing in November.
How to keep your memory steadyThe video explains the cause of memory slips, and how to get your memory back.
So before you close this page and the day takes you: play the full video now, while the kettle boils, and see what it shows.
The shoes are by the door either way.