Ears or Eyes

Ears or Eyes

Are you a person who loves to experience life primarily from what you see OR what you hear? Your preference may give you important clues about how you learn best. Some people are visual learners. Others are auditory. You may like being hands-on. If you favor activities and touch, you may be a kinesthetic learner. The way young children eagerly grasp for objects demonstrates tactile learning. One of these styles is not better than the other. Still, it is important to identify your personal style. I’ve known people who are exceptionally bright, though they underperformed in school. Later they found that their actual difficulty was with the way they were being taught. It didn’t match their learning style.

Recognize which approach is natural for you. Then, stress that learning style to experience and enjoy life. You may respond well to a blend of more than one style. If you have an auditory bent, as I do, I have a free resource for you at the end of this posting.

Though my wife reads extensively, her preferred style of learning is tactile. She doesn’t absorb information well from print or sound alone. She wants to interact with new information. In church, for instance, she takes extensive notes during sermons, but not so she will have written records, rather she finds that writing helps her absorb ideas. Another way I see her kinesthetic orientation is that painting is her creative recreation. I’m different. I enjoy spoken words. I like interviews on the radio. I prefer hearing an audiobook to reading the same words in print. When you were in school, how did you learn best? Did you get more from reading assigned books, lectures, or projects? Which method communicates best with you? When you know which method of learning appeals most to you, you become more interested in gaining knowledge and skills as long as they are presented in the format you need.

The Christian missionary movement pays particular attention to learning styles. Missionaries need to know how to communicate cross-culturally in order to provide education, spiritual care, and other services. Estimates are that between 70 and 80% of the world’s people are oral preference learners. Granted, a large portion of the world’s people are young children and semi-literate adults who cannot read well. Just the same, even among educated adults, many prefer hearing information over getting it from print.

I have a vested interest in the subject of how people like to learn because I’m eager to communicate what I’ve discovered about how to thrive during the mature years of adulthood. I have written the book THRIVE in RETIREMENT. Many people have been effusive saying it was both very helpful and fun reading. The book is available both in PRINT and on KINDLE. For those who find activities to be an energizing way to embrace new thinking, the content is available as a six-session STUDY GROUP CURRICULUM or as a ONE-DAY WORKSHOP.

For anyone who likes hearing stimulating ideas, THRIVE is also available as an AUDIOBOOK. Because of the growing interest in this significant new stage of life, I’m giving frequent interviews. Here’s a free audio introduction to thriving as an older adult.

Think Tank Questions Retirement

Think Tank Questions Retirement

The Christian worldview challenges ordinary thinking about retirement. A life of endless leisure rarely satisfies. Forty percent of older adults suffer clinical depression. Loneliness and lack of purpose in life are painfully common among older adults. Too often, people reach retirement age – a time that is supposed to be rewarding – only to find it empty and disappointing. A think tank of Christian leaders of retirement-season ministries gathered for a roundtable in November 2018 to pool their knowledge and insights.

Their papers and other resources will become available through a new clearinghouse of information called Retirement Reformation. #RetirementReformation. Near the conclusion of the roundtable, Eric Thurman presented his condensed summary of the message from their deliberations. You can listen to or read his three-minute account.

Three-Minute Summary

The message that I take away from our time together begins with the recognition that a lot of people are experiencing a new season of life, which is not only a new season of life for us, it is also whole new status in the history of humanity. Society is being affected by this, because this has never happened before, that people have decades of high functioning after they stopped working, their regular gainful careers. This is presenting all kinds of new challenges and opportunities that haven’t been thought about much before, but are really upon us.

With that recognition, we have been examining and have been critical of the usual pattern of retirement, the usual concepts of retirement…not to be condemning but to recognize that there’s an inherent flaw. The flaw is that retirement is representing that it has great happiness and opportunity for people, but, in fact, is proving to be disappointing instead, because it’s too hollow. It has too little substance to it. It’s not satisfying for a person to live out actively for several decades, twenty or thirty years.

What do we want instead? My mind went to the comment from around year 200 by Saint Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. We’re asking ourselves the question of what would it mean to glorify God by being fully alive during this new bonus season of our lives?

The idea then becomes one of comparing the usual [patterns of retirement] to what might be. The usual [way retirement is lived out] is really variations on emptiness. We talk about how we’re able to relax now. You can relax for a while, but when you get refreshed, and you still have capacity, then what happens? That’s where the emptiness comes in. We’ve used words like void. That’s usually what people are feeling, and that’s being expressed in the way people are experiencing so much loneliness, disconnectedness and lack of purpose in their lives.

By contrast, the biblical world view – God’s design for human beings – has some of these characteristics:
   that we would have lifelong growth,
   we would have lifelong connectedness,
   and we would have lifelong meaning that comes from living beyond ourselves.

We have common words for that like giving and serving. That’s kind of the contrast that we’re wrestling with and how to implement it. More than that, how to make it [this new opportunity for living retirement] known to people who are not aware of the trap that they’re falling into with ordinary thinking about how this season of life is lived out.