The Best Years

My parents said it to me. I hear parents today telling it to their children who are in college. “Enjoy college while you can. These are the best years of your life.”

What a depressing message! We are telling our young people that it is all downhill after school. Expect it to only get worse for the next sixty years or so. The lucky die young.

I enjoyed my college years but I never wanted to repeat them. There has always been too much to experience and learn at whatever stage of life I have been. I have always looked forward to what is next. There are people in their 80’s entering their next careers.

What fuels my enthusiasm for life is the joy of learning. Learning keeps me at my cutting edge, at the frontier of my identity. I keep learning that not only am I capable of more than I thought I was, I am more than who I thought I was. I keep discovering that the definition of who I am is dynamic and fluid. There will always be more of myself to discover as long as I keep looking.

The enthusiasm for lifelong learning is the message we need to be communicating to our students. The best way to communicate that message is by exhibiting our own joy for learning. I experience teaching as a gift. By teaching others I learn so much. There are times I break out in laughter in the middle of a lecture I am presenting. After I catch my breath, I explain to the confused class of students what new learning I have just grasped and how much fun I am having. No wonder I have a reputation for being crazy. But hey, I’m having the time of my life! And joy loves company. So I invite my students to lighten up and have fun learning, learning, learning!

We as teachers need to role model for our students. We need to lighten up and not take ourselves and our subjects so seriously. We need to allow our students to see by way of our actions the joys of learning, growing, and serving. Forget about youth being the best years of life. The best is yet to come!