Are you currently enrolled in any interesting training courses?
Yo estoy a punto de terminar el primer módulo de tres en una formación que me está encantando (ya entraré en detalles en otro artículo), y en mayo retomaré también otro curso que tuve que dejar a medias el año pasado. El caso es que a mi hija pequeña, que tiene ahora diez años, le sorprende muchísimo ese afán mío por seguir haciendo cursos, y me pregunta cuándo voy a parar…
I guess she finds it strange that someone would voluntarily decide to "keep going to school" when they could be doing something else. And now that I think of it, when I was her age, I was convinced that adults were really lucky because they didn´t have to do any homework! (Of course, I didn´t realize all the other implications of being an adult; I only saw that they had much more freedom to do "whatever they wanted").
(Photo of a mug I saw at our school, I found it very funny: "Keep calm and pretend it´s on the lesson plan").
To be fair, nowadays it´s a lot more common for us to continue our training in adulthood, both for personal and professional reasons. It´s what we call lifelong learning (translated into Spanish as "educación permanente"), and it´s tremendously helpful for a variety of things, some more obvious than others:
- Expand our knowledge, acquire new skills, adapt to an ever-changing work environment.
- Broaden our perspective, grow as professionals, and more importantly, evolve in our personal lives.
As if all that was not enough, lifelong learning has another huge benefit: learning new and interesting things gives us renewed curiosity; it helps us to stay motivated and active while exercising our minds, which in turn will help us to maintain good health and quality of life as we age.
Here are a couple of quotes to reflect on this topic, both from the same author: a self-taught thinker and philosopher who, despite never having attended college, went on to achieve a Nobel prize in literature.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth,
Eric Hoffer
while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
The truly human society is a learning society,
Eric Hoffer
where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.