73. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

“The Wurtz–Fittig reaction is the chemical reaction of aryl halides with alkyl halides and sodium metal in the presence of dry ether to give substituted aromatic compounds.” Believe it or not, at one time in my life that chemical reaction meant something to me. It was one of the hundred different famous reactions that I was able to repeat on an Organic Chemistry exam during my undergraduate studies. If we fast forward to today, this is just one tiny example of the above lesson - if you don’t use it, you lose it. 

During my four years studying chemistry my head was saturated with hundreds of “fascinating” tidbits of information like the above. I confess that I would not be able to pass the Chemistry 30 final exam in high school today. I guess this is not a surprise, as we all have spent a lot of our lives learning a lot of things that we have forgotten or never used. 

I surmise that much of what we have learned by rote in our younger years is just a faint memory now. I can still recite a couple of poems that I was required to memorize in school, and you all recognize what  a useful skill that is at a Christmas party. I have observed that a number of my friends who learned to play a musical instrument still maintain much of that skill even though they do not regularly practise it. I always envy anyone who can pick up a musical instrument and play something even if it is not too polished.

Foreign languages also seem to be much more ingrained in people even if they rarely use them. One of my friends can still recall enough Italian to communicate with relatives in Italy although he has lived his whole life in Canada. When we lived in Turkey for four years I had a simple functional ability to communicate in Turkish. Today it has been reduced to Merhaba (hello) and Gunaydin (good morning). Perhaps this lesson only applies to me. I hadn’t really thought of that!

I wonder, if we don’t practise our religion, our good manners, our compassion and our positive outlook will we begin to lose them! I hope not, but I know that I have forgotten all of my chemistry! Oh! Oh!