"Student" shouldn't be a four-letter word.

Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have. Louis E. Boone

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you're willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you. Barbara Sher

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. Albert Einstein

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. C. S. Lewis

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I've come to believe that all my past failures and frustrations were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy. Tony Robbins

There are more quotes than usual in this piece because they were all good and I couldn’t be brutal enough to edit any of them out! If you’ve read them you can get the major gist of this little talk: trying new things.

In a weird kind of way, Menopause is about renewal. Uh-oh! Now you’re thinking: she’s gone well and truly nutso! How can a time that marks THE END of an era be a renewal? Well, give me a few paragraphs here and I’ll show you how.

Think back to when you were a kid and in school. The majority of your daily life was devoted to learning. The goal was to teach you everything you’d need to know to become an adult. Then you went to college where you learned everything you needed to earn money in order to become a self sufficient adult. Then if you didn’t go on to a master’s program or further in order to continue on the career/learning/making more money path, you stopped going to school. And subsequently, you kind of stopped learning new things. When the spouse and then the kids came along you needed to focus your energies on them and not on yourself as much.

Know what happened? You stagnated intellectually. I know that sounds harsh, but it most cases, it’s true. Reading the latest edition of PEOPLE or Us WEEKLY will not increase your IQ. In some cases, it may even lower it a little.

Now that the kids are out of the house ( hopefully) and you have all this free time to yourself again, it’s time you devoted time to you.

When I was pregnant with my daughter and 30 years old, computers were about to explode and rule the world. I went to a local technical college two nights a week and learned what was, back then, the number one word processing program, Corel. After that, Microsoft and Apple blasted onto the scene, but I had the basics for learning how to use the computer and its systems. That basic knowledge has helped me tremendously throughout these past 23 years.

My fortieth birthday was a big wakeup call for me. I can’t remember exactly why I did this, but the gift I gave myself that year was a promise to learn one new thing every year for the rest of my life. Sounds wacky, right? It kind of was, but in the past 13 years, I have learned: to speak Spanish (not fluently, but I can order in a restaurant and ask directions, and I can get the gist of what someone is saying), how to cook meals from scratch, how to play the piano – which included how to read music – a really hard thing for someone like me; how to decorate cakes  (Thank you Wilton), how to paint, run a very small business and turn a profit, and how to garden, to name just a few highlights.

This year I resolved to become better at Social Media and joined Twitter for my birthday. Follow me at @Peggy_Jaeger (shameless plug).

The point is I am still a student even though my schoolroom years are way, way over. I have the physical time to devote to improving my brain, myself, and the world around me. Just because menopause marks the end of my potential baby-making years, it does not mark the end of me. It does not mark me as intellectually finished. The state of menopause does not mean I am done; over; kaput.

What it really means is that I can now dedicate myself to doing everything I put on the back burner for years and that there is no excuse not to do what I want to do. The number one thing that has been swimming around in my head for the past 15years is getting back into writing fulltime. I've made a pledge that I will write something everyday. This blog has been beneficial in helping with that, as was my blog on empty nest syndrome, but I've been writing for my first love - novel length fiction - everyday and I tell you, I haven't been so happy in years! And when Mama is happy EVERYONE in the house is happy!

So the long and short of it is that you should not wither and die intellectually during this period of your life, in fact you may even thrive to successes you never dreamed of. There is something youthful sounding to being called  a Lifelong Student no matter what age you are.