Use it or lose it

I have forgotten how to write.

Not in the authorial sense (although I'll leave it to others to determine my ability there). No, I mean in the physical, the manual sense.

Being left-handed, I've always struggled with penmanship. My explanation is that we left-handers always had to write around the metal rings in the middle of our notebooks, requiring digital Jujitzu. I haven't written in cursive since middle school. Attending college in the early 70s, before personal computers, I usually turned in papers with reasonably neat printed characters. When the computer age arrived, I began typing with two fingers. I am now up to four, occasionally five.

In the interim, my handwriting has deteriorated even further. At some point along the line, I gave up lower-case letters. Lately I seem to have abandoned all forms of neatness, and my notes, or forms I fill out, look like the work of an architect on LSD—all caps, but so haphazard and irregular that sometimes even I cannot read them.

I have also found a way to even avoid typing. Many of my longer pieces I create using voice-recognition software. It works very well, once I trained it to recognize my Southern drawl. It does occasionally come up with a howler, like when it hears me say "call doctor" instead of "Golgotha."

It makes me wonder what's next to wither from disuse, at least as pertains to my craft. Will my mind end up as dull as a broken pencil? My vision is corrected, my hearing is fair to good if I concentrate. But what about that vision which sees concepts and truths? Or the hearing that hears beyond the sound? I pray I do not lose these. That is why I exercize them, with disciplines like this blog. As far as I can tell, I only have the occasional visitor (even my wife must be cajoled). So consider this my exercise. Like an overweight guy doing Tai Chi, it may not be pretty, but I believe it is good for me.