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Time for discovery
Retirement and springtime. What better moment to explore new
ideas? The laterlife Challenge for April is on the topics of
Discovery and Ideas.
The suggestions we have received include, most appropriately,
learning more about computers. Yes indeed. I certainly get lazy and
take for granted the (very) small knowledge that I have acquired
about using a computer, as I am sure many of us do.
Many people said they intended to look up their family tree now
that they had extra time to spare. And of course, that’s an ideal
thing to do on the internet. There are special programmes you can
buy in order to make searching easier, but it’s possible to do it
from scratch too.
A rather wonderful suggestion was to ‘investigate evidence for
the afterlife’. That’s something you can do on the internet too,
though it could be a bit hard to prove. Check out with the Canyon
Institute for Advanced Studies in Phoenix, Arizona. John D. Barrow,
professor of maths at Cambridge University, has been given a prize
of nearly ?800,000 by the Institute for ‘progress toward research or
discoveries about spiritual realities’.
As a challenge, some of you thought that ‘more foreign holidays’
was a good one. They do say travel broadens the mind, so it
could qualify, though I’m not at all sure it does. You can go
somewhere and end up as closed in your thinking as you were before.
But on the other hand, travel can be exciting and stimulating, a
good way of opening up ideas about society. I’m sure that the person
who plans to go caravanning in an ‘old tourer’ will have plenty to
think about.
If you didn’t get a degree in your younger days, what better time
to study for one than in retirement? An intrepid visitor to
laterlife chose politics, and carried on even though diagnosed with
cancer of the lymph nodes. He got a 2:1 BA (Honours) at the age of
71 and now, at 74, having experienced chemo and radiotherapies, is
taking his Masters degree. Good luck to you, Conrad.
Studying the environment, conservation and recycling are
fairly new topics that come from another visitor to laterlife. Have a look at www.bbc.co.uk/climatechange
where you can utilise your computer to help improve knowledge about
global warming. Go on, everybody. Just do it. If ever there was a
need for discovery and ideas, this is it.
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Talkback is a
regular feature in laterlife.com run by
journalist and author Helen Franks. 
