What losing my memory taught me about ageing
By John Sutherland — Creator of Adaptive Bodywork Structural Integration. Twenty-plus years as a therapist, still learning what the body has to teach.
The Instrument Measuring Itself
This morning, while making breakfast, I found myself wondering how I would know if my mind were slipping.
I felt sharp, which is what made the question interesting. If my cognition had changed, what would I compare it to? The mind I had at 40? At 50? Yesterday’s? Whatever reference point I chose, I would still be using my present mind to judge my past one. The instrument doing the measuring is also the instrument being measured.
Most of us have had some version of this moment. A name refuses to come. You walk into the kitchen and can’t remember why. For a second there’s a flicker of worry, and the question underneath it is always the same: is this the beginning of something?
I’ve come to think we ask that question too narrowly. Part of the reason is that I’ve already lived through losing my memory, and it taught me that memory is only one piece of what a mind does.
The Bridge
As a teenager I was a passenger in a head-on collision on the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal. It was raining. Near the apex of the bridge, a car heading into the city crossed the centre line and struck us. I was wearing an old lap belt, and I pitched forward into the dashboard. I was in a coma for seven days.
When I woke, both my short-term and long-term memory had been badly disrupted. For a while almost nothing was available to me. My mother was one of the few things that still felt familiar.
Memory returned slowly, and the strangest part of the experience was that I didn’t know what I’d lost. Other people had to tell me. They repeated things and explained my own history back to me until a second problem appeared: I could no longer be sure whether I remembered an event or only remembered being told about it. Those turn out to be very different things, and telling them apart is harder than you’d think.
I adapted because I had to. I leaned on humour and context, on associations and social cues, and I learned to keep functioning without demanding perfection from memory. So when I forget a name at 67, it doesn’t frighten me the way it might frighten someone else. I’ve lived with some uncertainty about memory for most of my life, and I know from experience that a person can be whole without being flawless.
The Library
I think of memory as a vast library. Not every shelf is within reach, and sometimes you can’t find the book you want. That doesn’t mean the book is gone.
A smell can bring something back, or a piece of music, or a road you haven’t travelled in decades. Suddenly an experience returns in full colour, surprisingly intact, as though it had been waiting for the right cue. Many of the lapses we fear as disappearance may really be problems of access. That distinction matters, because a book that’s hard to find is a very different thing from a book that’s been burned.
Parts and the Whole
We usually measure cognition with tests of working memory, recall, processing speed and attention. They’re useful, but each captures only a fragment.
I’ve spent my life around athletes, and I’ve seen the same problem in sport. Picture someone with the best vertical jump, the strongest squat, the fastest sprint and the highest VO2 max on the team. Every test says they should dominate. Then you put them on the field and they can’t play. They can’t read the game, and they can’t pull those isolated capacities together into a performance that works. The parts are excellent and the whole is not.
People are the same. Someone can score well on every individual measure and still struggle to run their life, while someone who tests less impressively navigates complexity beautifully. Cognition, for me, lives in that integration: in how well the whole person, body included, meets the situation in front of them. That’s why I can’t separate it from how I train, sleep, eat and move, or from how I handle the hundred small decisions that fill an ordinary day.
Designing Around Forgetting
I do forget things. I retrace my steps into the room where a thought started, because returning to the place often restores the association. If it doesn’t, I let it go. If it mattered, it usually comes back.
I misplace my phone, so I use my watch to find it. Appointments go in the calendar rather than in my head, and if I need something from the store I write it down. Anything important enough that forgetting it would cause a problem gets a system built around it. I consider that good design. It’s a principle I carried over from 25 years in graphic design: keep it simple, and don’t ask any one part to carry more than it needs to.
In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes compares the mind to an attic that shouldn’t be cluttered with useless facts. I’ve always liked that. I don’t need my mind to be a warehouse. I need it to be a navigator.
I also have an outside witness. My partner, Jelena, knows my patterns, and every so often she’ll tell me, “You already told me that.” It’s useful to hear. When you try to judge your own mind, the observer and the observed are the same person, and someone who knows you well can catch repetitions you’ll never notice yourself.
What Changes With Age
I don’t think the same way at 67 that I did at 40. At 40 I was racing bicycles and travelling to velodromes, with national sprint titles behind me and a hunger to win more. Decline didn’t occupy any space in my head.
At 67, mortality is no longer abstract. People I knew have become ill, and some have died. The arithmetic is visible now.
Something else has grown in that time, though. I’ve been studying health, training and human performance since I was a teenager, and decades of reading and experimenting have settled into something that resembles intuition. Someone says something and, before I can explain why, a part of me says that doesn’t sound right. The patterns have repeated often enough that recognition arrives before the explanation. I may forget why I walked into the kitchen, yet I can often grasp a complex problem faster than I once did, because I’ve already seen twenty versions of it.
That’s the trade most tests miss. Recall may soften while judgment sharpens. Speed may drop while pattern recognition deepens. Asking whether you’re declining overall is like asking whether an athlete is declining overall. The honest answer is always another question: in which dimension, and compared to what?
A Better Question
So I’ve stopped asking whether I’m declining. The question I find more useful is whether I can still fully inhabit my life. Can I still learn and adapt? Can I still connect with people, stay curious, and move toward something that matters?
There’s a quality I hope to carry into my eighties and nineties, and I call it timelessness. By that I mean the feeling of being as present in my own life as I’ve ever been. I don’t expect to be exempt from being human. I may need more recovery from a sprint than I used to, and I’ll forget more names. My aim is to work intelligently within those conditions.
Perhaps cognition was never mainly about remembering everything, or even about speed. Perhaps it’s the capacity to stay in relationship with the world, to notice what’s happening and choose how to take part.
If that’s the measure, the question each of us can ask is a simple one: Am I still here? Still curious, still connected, still adapting and moving forward?
Today, for me, the answer is yes. I hope it is for you too.
Your body is part of how you think and how you meet the world. A session of Adaptive Bodywork Structural Integration leaves you more present and more at home in your own body.
About John Sutherland
John Sutherland is the creator of Adaptive Bodywork Structural Integration (ABSI) and a registered massage therapist in Montréal. He is also the only certified Anatomy Trains Structural Integration therapist in the city, and has spent years applying that work to his own body as a competitive masters sprinter.
His work is informed by decades of clinical experience, advanced structural integration training, and a lifetime devoted to understanding human movement—from elite international sport to the treatment of people seeking relief from pain, improved performance, and greater freedom of movement.
Adaptive Bodywork was built upon a simple conviction: the body is not a machine to be corrected, but an adaptive living system to be understood. Every treatment reflects that philosophy, helping individuals discover more efficient, resilient, and comfortable ways of organizing themselves rather than imposing change from the outside.
Whether working with chronic pain, athletic performance, or the ordinary challenges of everyday life, John’s goal remains the same: to help people better understand their own remarkable capacity to adapt.
The body you’ve been living in doesn’t have to be the body you keep living in.
