Thursday, March 4, 2010

Lifelong Learning Thursday

Nancy Merz Nordstrom, author of Learning Later, Living Greater: The Secret of Making the Most of Your After 50 Years will share the benefits of Lifelong Learning on Thursdays.


LEARNING LATER, LIVING GREATER:
The Secret for Making the Most of Your After-50 Years.

Lifelong Learning in Your Later Years…
A Health Club for Your Mind, Body, and Spirit!

My Next Step…

A year after leaving school I found my perfect job, a combination of learning and travel, with Elderhostel, Inc., the nation’s first and largest educational travel provider for older adults. For the next five years, from their headquarters in Boston, I directed the Elderhostel Institute Network (EIN).

Different from Elderhostel’s regular type of educational travel programming, EIN helps start new lifelong learning institutes or learning in retirement programs, for older learners at local colleges, universities, retirement communities and other venues.

We also provide resources to all these programs, help organize regional conferences, and promote communication between all the programs. Today we have almost 400 programs affiliated with EIN. It is a stimulating and enriching job that feeds my soul, a far cry from my secretarial days.

In 2004 my new husband (I remarried at age 55), and I left Boston and moved to New Hampshire, where I have continued the same work with Elderhostel, not as an employee, but as a consultant, working from home.

In 2004 I also seriously began thinking about an idea which had been lurking in the back of my mind for sometime – writing a book about lifelong learning for older adults. It had become clear to me that the concept, benefits and opportunities of lifelong learning for older adults needed more exposure.

So, once again I took yet another step outside my comfort zone, and after a lot of hard work, in the early fall of 2006, “Learning Later, Living Greater: The Secret for Making the Most of Your After-50 Years,” became a reality when it was published by Sentient Publications in Boulder, Colorado.

It seems to me the publishers are a perfect match for the book, which is a kind of “transformative, holistic approach to fostering human potential” in one’s later years, as their web site says. The book was, after all, conceived and written to inform the Baby Boomers and others about the value lifelong learning can bring to their later years. A user-friendly, easy, breezy read, a kind of guidebook for the After-50 years, the title really says it all.


Next Week…My Story Wraps Up


THURSDAY’S THOUGHT…
Henry Miller, the American playwright, said, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” This program certainly taught me to look at my life in a new and different way.
For more information on Learning Later, Living Greater visit http://www.learninglater.com/You can purchase Learning Later, Living Greater at http://www.amazon.com/

Till Next Time…

Nancy Merz Nordstrom is Director of the Lifelong Learning Department at Computer School for Seniors (http://www.cs4seniors.com/)

1 comment:

Rita said...

Really interesting blog! So much out there for us to learn.