LIFELONG LEARNER BECOMING A

By Lainee Cox

About the Author

Lainee Cox is a southern Utah native, born and raised in Parowan, Utah. She moved to St. George in 2019 to attend Utah Technical University and enjoy her time in sunny St. George. In 2021, looking for a more fulfilling line of work, she joined the team at Spilsbury Mortuary. Lainee is passionate about providing support to those grieving the loss of someone special and creating a personalized tribute for each person in Spilsbury’s care.

As summer fun comes to an end and school starts up again, I find myself missing high school. Many people miss high school for a number of reasons: sports, simplicity, friendships, the lack of bills. Although I miss high school for all of these things, what I miss most is being in an environment designed for learning all day, every day. Having my brain filled with new and useful information was wonderful to me.

Although I am just five years out of high school, I am beginning to lose that feeling of being full of new, useful, and stimulating information. It seems like all the new information I gather is repackaged information that I already grasped, not all that useful, or not at all stimulating to me. Even the tailored content on social media just doesn’t help me grow my brain like I want it to, which is not so surprising, I guess!

When I first started to notice this hole in my life last January, I made a goal to learn something new, useful, or interesting every day and to write it down. I wanted to train myself to become someone who thirsted after information—someone that my grandmother would classify as a “lifelong learner.”

So, to achieve the goal of becoming a lifelong learner, I started looking for ways to increase my knowledge in subjects that would improve my life. With information so accessible through the internet, it was easier than I expected to find new information. And with my headphones on, I could learn while doing other things!

The biggest challenge I faced was balancing the minutiae of daily life while trying to achieve my goal. As is often the case, people who are trying to create new habits struggle finding the time to start new routines. However, after talking with my spouse, I was able to allocate an extra thirty minutes each day to focused learning. Though this doesn’t seem like a lot of time, these thirty minutes have really helped me improve myself mentally. Now, at the end of each day, I write down the new information that I have learned; it makes me feel extremely accomplished. It truly feels like I’ve rediscovered a love for learning.

I hope that this will inspire you to try and learn something new every day. Make a conscious, focused effort to learn something new rather than just grasping at a random fact that is neither useful nor interesting to you. Becoming a lifelong learner will help keep your mind sharp and more accepting of new information, which can become harder and harder to do as we age. The results of daily learning are absolutely worth it!