Our eight-month-old nephew is fascinated with everything. He loves buttons, lights, smiles, and pigeons. Babies learn at an incredible rate. Their fascination drives their learning. This drive somehow dwindles as we get older. I wonder what it would be like to keep the same baby-like fascination throughout life, enthralled by the simple, the bizarre and the new. Constantly being interested and constantly learning.
Ongoing learning takes humility. When we think we have learned enough, we go stale. We need humility to realise that we don’t know that much. Saying “I don’t know” positions us to relook at all the answers and remain interested. So many truths in the Bible are found in the tension of two opposing views – to gain these views, we must lower our guard and hear what other people think. We learn and grow within the grey areas of cosmic anomalies.
With humility comes a renewed sense of wonder. I’m fascinated that the light of some stars in the sky takes hours to reach earth. The planets that we are seeing in the night sky could be completely destroyed, and we could be gazing at them for hours as though they were still there. I honestly don’t know how that works, but there is something magnificent about gazing at a skyscape, thinking that it might not really be there.
The common maxim is that learning lengthens life. My grandmother, the only grandparent I knew, was a hardy Scottish lady with the verve of the wind. While she was in her 90s, she would climb ladders, carry a hammer in her handbag to hit loose nails and even play basketball with us. In her late 70s, her husband died and she had no one to drive her around, so she decided to get a licence. She drove for 10 years, well into her 80s, stopping only when my father crashed her car. She was adamant about watching a quiz show with maths and language problems at 4:30 pm everyday to keep all her faculties functioning properly. On the day of her death, she had correctly solved the daily maths conundrum. She died at 96, having lived a life full of activity. It was her interest in people and things that kept her going; a testament to constantly remaining humble and interested.
Peter Drucker, the renowned management guru, wrote a lot about learning outside our normal disciplines. Drucker practised what he preached. In addition to writing several books on management, he wrote and lectured on Japanese art until he could no longer travel. The great missionary pioneer William Carey hardly had any discipline that he was a stranger to. In addition to translating the Bible into many languages, he was a keen botanist and started the first horticultural society in India.
One of the advantages of the age that we live in is that we have a world of resources available to us on the internet to help us continue to grow and learn. Here are a few good resources available to us online that we can explore:
Written by Jonny Abraham.
Jonny is the Chief Servant and Delegator of Fusion in New Delhi. He is passionate about servant leadership. In his non-spare time, Jonny consults on leadership training with NGOs, companies and UN agencies. In his spare time, he spares time for a lovely wife and two boisterous daughters.