What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers. …Martina Horner
The benefits of Lifelong Learning are almost too numerous to list but here are a few. Lifelong Learning…
• Helps us fully exploit our natural abilities while striving to lessen our faults. • Enables us to immerse ourselves in the wonders of life. • Provides us a measure of how our lives should be lived to the best of our ability. • Points out the trip-falls of life so we can avoid them in our pursuit of happiness. • Teaches us to look beyond the surface and see the truth as it really is. • Simulates our natural curiosity of the world around us. • Help us increase our wisdom during our Third Age and use our experiences to make the world a better place. • Enables us to face the inevitable changes of society
In the words of Harvey MacKay, author of four New York Times bestsellers, “You don’t go to school once for a lifetime; you are in school all of your life. That’s why they call graduation “commencement”–it’s just the beginning.”
He goes on to say, “You can grow as much as you want to. Your mind has plenty of room to hold information. We typically use only 10% of our brains. Would you be satisfied to get that little service out of any other part of your body?” …We live in the information age, the space age, the early years of the new Millennium. Technology has given us
access to facts and figures and people and places at the touch of a button. We have every opportunity to learn and grow at any hour of the day. Today is the right time to start expanding your mind.”
And, if the 1990s were the mandated “Decade of the Brain,” then it has been suggested by Sandra Timmermann, Director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute in Westport, Connecticut that the 2000s will be the decade known as the “Mainstream Era” for older adult lifelong learning. She cites several reasons for this.
1. Research on the brain and how the mind works has revolutionized the way we think about learning as we age.
2. More nontraditional organizations and institutions want to know about older adults–what they are experiencing physically, socially and emotionally–and how to provide information to them most effectively.
3. The boomers will take lifelong learning for granted and incorporate education in their lives well into old age.
4. Continual learning is increasingly viewed as helping older adults unleash the creativity and find meaning in their lives.
5. There will always be committed, creative individuals who will have an idea, a concept for an adult-learning program that will capture our imaginations and take off.
Furthermore, another in-process research study involving aging has released the following preliminary results, again demonstrating the benefit to persons involved in programs where creativity is an ingredient:
• Better overall health • Significantly fewer doctor visits • Diminished use of medications • Significantly less depression and loneliness • Increased involvement in activities.
These are certainly goals worth striving for, starting today.
And today, as Harvey MacKay said, is the right time to start expanding your mind. You are taking that first step just by reading this column. At no other time in history has our society been so poised to accept the value of later life learning.
Lifelong learning, as the research shows, makes our lives better. Since
each of us has to live our entire life with ourselves, doesn’t it make sense for us to want to be informed, reasoning and interesting beings? By engaging in lifelong learning, we will be those informed, reasoning and interesting beings. And, by doing so, we will have happier, more fulfilled lives.
A Special Opportunity for Readers of this Column Want to test the waters of lifelong learning? I can’t think of a better way then by spending one day listening to award winning professors from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and other top tier schools, who come together to offer you an elite, live classroom learning experience.
Check out www.onedayuniversity.com to learn more, and see if there’s a one-day university near you. If so, when you register, thanks to your reading of this column, you will get a 15% discount on the cost of the program. Just type in the word “LIFELONG” as your coupon code when you register at the website, or use it when calling 800-811-8821 to register. It’s that simple!
