Roslyn DeBoer, Doorway- the Journey Begins
Learning is the fountain of youth.
No matter how old you are,
You mustn’t stop growing.Don’t think that creativity is only for artists, writers, and musicians. Creativity is an essential element for everyone. Unlike the outer-directed creativity of making art, solving problems, or writing, the creativity that everyone can engage in is learning.
As long as we continue to learn, welcome new ideas and ways of doing things, and continually expand our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, then we are engaging in the ultimate creativity of the self.
If one looks carefully at those seniors who are ongoing and vital participants in life, one will see that a common habit is continuous learning and interest. These seniors are not the same as they were in their youth. They have found new ways of learning and acting.
As we enter each new phase of our lives, the parameters change. If we are sixty, we cannot do the same activities that we did as teenagers. Therefore, we need to revamp ourselves according to our situation. That continuing act of creativity keeps us young.
“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”
— Buddha
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live. ~Mortimer Adler
“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” — Mark Twain
“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” — Will Rogers
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“More important than learning how to recall things is finding ways to forget things that are cluttering the mind.”
— Eric Butterworth
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. ~Mark Twain
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. ~Antisthenes
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. ~Thomas Huxley
Give up learning and put an end to your troubles — Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
— Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
Those who know are not learned.
The learned do not know.
— Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. ~Thomas Szasz
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. ~H.G. Wells
Why does the Tao seem so contradictory about learning? Well, it isn’t. The secret of learning is to give up the idea that there are things you have already learned, to “lose something” so you can learn. Then everything becomes open to rediscovery, to new ways of approaching the subject, to acquiring something new.
Most of us think we “aren’t good” at art, for instance. Why? Because when we “learned” about art, we were shown the works of great artists, and then, when we looked at what we could actually produce, it didn’t look like that. We made a judgment then on our own art, instead of realizing we were in the midst of learning. But the secret of creativity, of art, of anything, is to produce what is uniquely your own. You might use techniques others have used, but the work will always be unique to you.
Forget about what you have learned, and learn something new, or learn something anew. Then you can develop a new approach and take it farther than you could before. That is how we grow. By being open to learning, and understanding that our pre-conceived notions may need to be discarded along the way.
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[…] those who have come to grow, the whole world is a garden. For those who have come to learn, the whole world is a university. For those who have come to know God, the whole world is a prayer […]