Summer School
I miss summer already. Maybe it’s a holdover from childhood when the final school bell rang and the doors flung wide to spill kids and teens into a budding June they could claim for themselves. School was good for many people, but I wasn’t one of them. For me, real learning began once those school doors slammed shut behind me.
Summertime sparked my mind, ignited it in a way sitting in a classroom never could. Why? Because I controlled my learning, not someone else. Transported by books, bicycles, and blue skies—willing screens where I projected a vivid imagination—my mind expanded as I chased whatever drew my interest. At least until September closed in. Since those summer days of self-directed exploration, I’ve always considered any learning I’ve accomplished on my own as “summer school,” an educational program driven by someone who had my best interests in mind.
Maybe you’re like me and felt you didn’t learn the things you really wanted to when you were in school or even college. Maybe you feel it’s too late to do anything about it now.
It’s never too late, no matter how old you are. You simply must take charge of your own education and enroll yourself into the “summer school” of your choosing.
Every Lessons from the Cockpit post is a summer school lesson, insights learned from living life outside school walls, doing the things I’ve wanted to do versus been required to do. I’m thrilled to say I’m in summer school year round, although over the last five months, I think I’ve learned more than ever. This last summer I began writing a novel, an education unto itself. I’ve enjoyed losing myself in the writing, living in the new world I’m creating. But doing so has surfaced old memories, events, and experiences I haven’t thought of in a long while. Most of these events had wedged themselves into the crevices of my mind like the corners of old photographs jutting from the pages of a closed book. I’d see a flash of color, but no real recollection until I pulled the memory from its neglected nook to examine it within the light of what I wrote.
Many of the old lessons I explored this summer will make it into the novel. Others will not. So in a nod to my favorite season, and my favorite educational institution, my next few posts will focus on past summer school lessons recently brought to light.
Until the next post, think about what you’ve always wanted to learn, but never did. It doesn’t matter if you think it has any value to society or as a pathway to a new career for yourself. The value lies in the fact you want to do it. That is enough. If you hear a voice in your head claiming you’re too old to pursue your goal, swat it aside and remember this:
It’s never too late to become the person you wish to be.
