Physical Prowess, Mental Acuity, and Wisdom: Sunday musings…1/25/2026
Here we are, almost 4 weeks into another new year. With the exception of a single resolution to endeavor to be more like some of my friends who I admire, to adopt one or two of the laudable traits that make up their character, I really didn’t make up a list of traditional “things I should do” in the new year. And here it is, almost February, and I’ve yet to sit down to ponder how I fared in the year just past. As a way to do this each year I return to a little thought experiment I discovered in the WSJ some 8 or so years ago that measures, at least for me, whatever declines I may have experienced, against those gains that I have (hopefully) made:
You are given the option of taking a pill that will halt the aging process. At what age would you decide that the balance of physical prowess, mental acuity, and age-begotten wisdom, was optimized? At what age do you take the pill?
After a certain point that is different for everyone, each human begins to experience an inexorable decline in their physicality. Strength, speed, endurance, balance. Pretty much all of our physical attributes will show a net decrease over time. My physical prowess probably peaked in medical school. My classmates and I somehow found time to play hours of pick-up basketball each week, and we organized countless squash round-robins in a school with 20 racquetball but only two squash courts. Beth and I had already discovered a shared love of strength training, and for wild reasons of all the wrong kind, a small group of us found joy in the back row of the aerobics classes then in vogue. Age 26 was my peak year in this domain.
In a similar way, we become less “sharp” mentally. We may still maintain possession of our memories, our internal hard drive if you will, but we begin to experience slower access to them. Our computational abilities decline as well. Now, to be sure, this is not a straight-line decline, not like an airliner on the glide path. It’s more like descending through a rolling hillside on the way to the valley below: both physical and mental prowess can be enhanced, at least temporarily, through purposeful action.
On the flip side of this we have what we would all understand as “wisdom”. Wisdom is something more than simply experience. It’s more like, I dunno, actionable experience I guess. It’s a kind of knowing, a confidence leavened by compassion, in the act of decision making. If you are fortunate your wisdom is a source of comfort for some of your people. Having you, and your wisdom, makes their lives better.
Along with this comes a deeper type of happiness that you hopefully gain by ever closer relationships with those same people. Family, for sure, but close, loyal friends as well. Another year has hopefully brought you deeper, more positive interpersonal relationships that result from your wisdom. Another year has brought you more joy as well as an ever greater ability to recognize and embrace that joy (read the latest findings from the famous Harvard study on happiness over a lifetime: The Good Life by Waldinger and Schulz).
One very important aspect of that age-begotten wisdom is the ability to take a gimlet-eyed view of the decline. Blake Crouch in “Upgrade”: “If we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older version of who we used to be, the way we grieve departed friends.” Grieve yes. Pine, no. To pine for that earlier version is to regret not figuratively taking that time-stop pill earlier. Our wisdom will hopefully allow us to take the occasional trip back in time for the pleasure of watching a less-wise but almost surely more exciting version of ourselves.
Physicality, mental acuity, and wisdom. As noted, physicality and mental acuity can be trained to a point. After discovering CrossFit in 2005, just before my 46th birthday, I enjoyed a kind of “mini-peak” in my physical fitness at age 48. For the first time in my life I got really serious about strength; I was likely as strong as I was as a 22 year old football player in college. Likewise, until a shoulder injury derailed me at 49, I was likely MORE fit from a cardiovascular standpoint than at any other time in my life. Still, I managed to stay within hailing distance of 49 for almost 10 years.
The failure and ultimate “departure” of my left hip in 2019 brought a rather rapid reversal of many of these mid-life gains. Alas, despite what looked like a promising road to retrieval of at least some of those gains was derailed by my right hip’s decision to follow suit. Adding injury to insult, months of post-op pain prevented me from returning to even my pre-op levels of physicality. Now, at 66, the fight is similar to swimming in one of those pools in which you try to stay still while you swim against, for me, a current set somewhere around age 61.
The last peak.
Like all doctors in my generation I probably contained more stored information in my brain at the time of my med school graduation at age 26. I was likely as smart as I would ever be, at least without the help of a Google search or guidance from Claude, one of my new best friends, when I graduated from my residency at age 30. Still, even with this in mind it is glaringly obvious that my overall mental acuity continued to expand and improve, not only in the ever finer prism of my professional acuity, but also as a thinking “machine” in general. I began to write in earnest some time around 2004 or 5, expanding the “fitness” of my language “muscle”. Looking back and reading my earlier stuff I got steadily better as a writer for many years, at least until 2019 or so when I “lost” my muse, CrossFit. I still write something pretty decent on occasion though, both here and in the tiny little “home” I’ve carved out in my professional spaces.
Has my mental acuity started to back up like my physicality? Man, that’s a really tough call to make from the “inside”, ya know? I find myself spending an extra heartbeat or two waiting for a name to arrive, and I admit to finding it easier to just Google-check myself for random factoids I might have just tossed out with confidence in years past. Still, from a functional intellect standpoint where one is tasked with evaluating the data on hand and coming to a conclusion or making a decision, I’ve probably been sitting on my peak for quite a few years.
Likely still sitting on a rather high altitude mesa, a long-lived peak.
Which leaves wisdom. There’s a lot that’s packed into wisdom, especially if we want to continue to think of this thought experiment as a three-legged koan without adding smaller, however meaningful subcategories. If we include things like the ability to discover and experience joy, or as I wrote in an earlier year the capacity to both extend and accept empathy under the umbrella of wisdom, we can make it work.
In the last couple of years I have learned that increasing wisdom is harder and involves more pain than what it took to gain greater physical prowess or mental acuity, or the tribulation inherent in fighting off the inexorable and inevitable decline in both. Wisdom is certainly there to be gained in joyful experiences like the Mulligan we get if we are lucky enough to have grandchildren and to relive childhood years without the pressure of parenthood. It is there to be found in witnessing joy in those we care about. Hopefully our wisdom can be put to use in the pursuit of joy in ourselves and in others.
But wisdom seems to be a bit of a double-edged sword, I think. It seems that a meaningful amount of one’s wisdom comes about from times of hardship, or pain, or loss. I’ve written that the months of pain I experienced after my second hip surgery changed me. I am so very grateful that the pain stopped; I find it easier to come to situations with a grateful mindset, a subtype of wisdom. Each episode of lost innocence when expectations are unmet, especially by those closest to us. Lost parents. Lost or misplaced friends or, Heaven forbid, children. Any or all of this seems to impart the kind of wisdom which, when imparted either to others or simply within, is gained.
Wisdom, and the growth of wisdom within me, is the greatest reason I have turned down “the pill” in our little thought experiment. Looking back, even way back, it is the reason why I wouldn’t have taken the pill if someone had given the option at my physical peaks at 26 or 48, or the last peak at 59. Why I would not have stopped the clock at 30 or 40 or 50, or even this lovely high plateau as my intellectual gains began to slow. This type of knowing, of knowing joy and empathy, of knowing that I can still find gains in the most elemental essence of those closest to me, to experience growth DESPITE what are the inevitable declines in physicality and acuity, seems too precious a possibility to decline.
And so once again, at 66, I will gaze upon the pillbox and wonder, as I slowly close its cover and store it for another year. Will I ever make the call? Will the unescapable slide in physical and mental prowess eventually outpace the growth of wisdom? Ah, how could one know? Maybe the best I can do is to have a little hope, perhaps make a tiny wish that I am granted a bit more wisdom, at least for a little while, with only a little bit of the pain or the loss to pay.
Maybe, if I may, only a tiny bit to pay.
I’ll see you next week…
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