One of the things I appreciate about where I live is how much they do to help us have better all-around health, including our all important brain health.

I suspect that not many associations stress brain health, but you will be seeing and hearing more of that in the future. One of their important goals here is to help us be more active and more interactive.

They keep reminding us of one important word — MOVE, MOVE, MOVE. And they keep giving us fun ways to accomplish that.

It’s not the kind of place that takes your money then leaves you to your own activities. Instead, they keep giving us challenges designed to lead us to a better life.

Last week’s challenge was about the importance of social connections. Statistics show that people with strong social ties have a lower risk of early death, heart disease, stroke and mental decline.

And, of course, there were challenges and fun activities to go along with the challenge.

This was our challenge for week: Sit with someone new at a meal or invite someone new to share an activity.

I am a highly social person but I will confess that the challenges are harder than you think.

They didn’t want us to simply connect with a friend. It was stressed that we should connect with someone new, someone we might not even know.

I found that even someone as outgoing as I am might have a hard time approaching a stranger to share a meal.

Fortunately, I was helped by the fact that about 100 others were doing the same thing.

One woman who was also doing the challenge came up to me and asked me if I would share a meal with her. We both were going to include our husbands since we always ate dinner with them.

Although her apartment is close to mine we never exchanged more than a friendly hello.

Plus, she always eats with the same group of eight people every day. There are some people who are most comfortable with “the familiar.” They want to eat with the same people every day and stay with their own crowd for social events.

Perhaps one reason why Southport stressed we needed to eat with someone new was they wanted us to mingle more and get to know more people.

I was all for it, but my husband makes it clear he wants to just eat with me. He’s not comfortable with new people But he had to do it for one night for the sake of the exercise.

It turned out he enjoyed our new friends and discovered they all were boaters and had a lot in common.

To tell the truth, David most often enjoys the new people he meets. But that doesn’t mean he wants to do it all the time.

I, on the other hand, wish I could do it more often.

For the second assignment, to invite someone to share an activity with me, I picked someone from a group conversation who seemed lively and wasn’t afraid to share her thoughts.

Her name is Pat, and she was all in favor of trying for a new friendship.

We met at our local bistro for a light lunch and it went really well, despite the fact that we were opposites in what we liked to do.

But women can always find common ground — and we did. It went so well that we made plans to meet more often.

For one of our follow-up meetings we went to a concert since we liked music. Just when I was thinking she was going to be a good friend she made a comment that my housing development was so ugly it made her want to throw up. She said her housing section was a lot nicer.

I couldn’t believe she was insensitive enough to say something like that.

My girlfriend Jean said she also struck out in her efforts to make a new friend. She invited four women in her exercise class to join her for a little pizza party. Only one showed up.

But the good news is that the sole woman who came to her pizza party seems to be turning into a new friend for Jean. What we are learning is that it’s not easy to make a new friend when you are older.

But it’s possible.

Email Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net