Where did the fever to learn get off to?
This afternoon I received an email from a friend’s progeny, looking for information on where to take a particular training course on the Island, and it struck me that time is doing some sort of surreal warpspeed thing. The last time I’d had a personal interest in that course was thirty years ago. My own children weren’t even “on the radar”.
Now, thanks to the Facebook community I did find another old fella’ that actually had the coordinates and I passed them along; email is useful for something other than eBay outbid notices and spam warnings. It’s just that a lot of the high tech training I received when I was a “keener” is now sadly dated; I could probably kill myself if I depended on the retained knowledge. Worse, I don’t foresee returning to retrain, so I’m going to have to put those various certifications into the scrapbook and get on with life. Is that what getting older is all about? Realizing that the things you learned are most useful to people in charge of museums? Ouch.
I’ve learned a few other things over the last three decades, but those were wonderful times, when we imagined buying a cube truck and becoming a team of experts, just like in an adventure movie. Now the biggest adventure each day involves salty soup or runaway dogs or why I should avoid practicing music yet again.
I need to learn some new skills; that skydiving thing that was on TV last afternoon might be fun. Maybe I can take a crack at Everest, or run with the bulls in Pamplona. Actually, this points to a midlife crisis, but that would require too much effort. Let’s downgrade the “crisis” to “blip” and get back to nap time.
