You Can Learn Anything You Want to Learn - Part V

You Can Learn Anything You Want to Learn

If You Are Willing to Learn – Part V

I write to encourage you that you can learn anything you want to learn if you are willing to learn.  I think of three clergy colleagues who declared God’s call on their lives to seek ordination to the gospel ministry.  They entered professional ministry at a later stage in their lives.  Each of them was more than sixty years of age.  Easily, they could have short circuited the process by seeking ordination based upon their personal experience as disciples and decades of membership in a local church.  Most commendably, they refused to travel the easier, softer path.  Steadfastly, they applied to seminary to earn the professional degree required of the ordained clergy.  One of my three colleagues did not have a baccalaureate degree.  She started from the beginning, committing the next decade of her life to earning a bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  Bearing the expense, she further dedicated herself to obtaining a formal theological education. As I recall this woman was in her seventies when she completed these studies.  This means she enrolled in college in her late sixties; at a time when most people reason that earning an undergraduate degree is a foregone possibility.  “Why would someone start such a long and arduous educational journey at that point in life?”  Nonetheless, my three colleagues wanted to be trained clergypersons and were willing to complete any required task to accomplish their heartfelt and professional goals.  Are you as willing as they were?

In addition to considering learning Spanish or some other language, you possibly have other latent and unexplored interests.  Do you watch cooking shows and have Walter Smitty moments of winning one of the contests?  Have you harbored dreams of cooking with the expertise of a French, Italian or chef from another region of the world?  Does your dream vacation remain within your mind?  Have you traveled to Cape Good Hope in South Africa, the Amazon Rain Forests in Brazil, the Outback in Australia, the Mayan ruins in Mexico, the Great Wall in China, the obelisk in the center of Istanbul in Turkey or the Emperor penguins in Antarctica?  Perhaps, you will admit silently and humbly that you never learned to swim.  Is a camera sitting on a closet shelf collecting dusk? What about tennis rackets, golf clubs, polo sticks, toolboxes, paint brushes, mechanical pens, or musical instruments?  All these ideas offer opportunities to learn something new and develop expertise if you are willing.  Pause for a moment.  Stand or sit still.  Think long and hard.  Are there childhood dreams and goals that lay dormant in your mind and heart?  Has time covered them over with cobwebs of fear, forgetfulness, surrender and inertia?  Were you previously unable to act on these ideas due to circumstances beyond your control?  Were you unable to afford lessons and instruments?  Did you lack your family’s support to actualize these interests and abilities?  The powerful examples of my three clergy colleagues prove it is never too late to begin! 

I conclude with a few additional examples to encourage you with this simplistic yet empowering concept.  You can learn anything that you genuinely want to learn.  Marie Jastrow, the mother of renowned astronomer, Robert Jastrow, lived to ninety-five years of age.  She wrote three books; the first of which was published when she was seventy-five years old.  Harland Sanders, “Colonel Sanders,” started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was sixty-two years old.  Jack Canfield, co-author with Mark Victor Hansen of the international bestselling collection of Chicken Soup for the Soul books, endured nearly one hundred and fifty rejections from publishers before finding one in Florida who printed and distributed his original book.  Canfield was nearly fifty years old when he received the break he needed.  Dame Judi Dench was sixty-one when Hollywood discovered this diamond amid the British and American theatre world.  Basketball great, Michael Jordan, was cut from his high school team as the coach deemed Jordan lacked basketball intelligence.  Jordan’s dedication to excellence is known to the world.  At one juncture in Oprah Winfrey’s career, a television producer terminated her employment; characterizing her broadcasting and reporting as unfit for the industry.  Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Second World War, lost five elections, had a lateral lisp and suffered from clinical depression.  Surviving the early death of her mother to multiple sclerosis, academic and personal rejections, an abusive marriage and divorce and repeated rejections from publishers, J. K. Rowling, author of the international mega-selling Harry Potter series, is the first writer to become a billionaire from writing alone.  These eight stories of tenacity share the commonality of this column’s premise.  If you really want to learn something, nothing can prevent you from doing so if you are willing to learn.