HOW INTERESTING AND INTERESTED ARE YOU?
A thoughtful contribution from Sandy Boreham of the Port Elizabeth U3A, introduces thisbranch to our Johannesburg members, and we hope that it will not be long before we have
many other articles and stories from branches and members. It certainly serves to keep us in
touch with one another!
Do you want to be interesting and interested? When we are interesting and interested we get
a lot more fun out of life, as well as making the most of ourselves. And U3A gives us all that
chance, because if we want to be interesting and interested, we have to look outwards away
from ourselves towards other people and things outside the self. Instead of thinking and
worrying about ourselves all the time, we have to be concerned about other people and what
is happening around us. We have to be eager to share activity with the people around us by
taking part and doing things with them. We have to be keen enough not always to wait until
we are asked, when we see that somebody else could do with some help, or when we notice
something that needs doing or something that is worth trying, like for instance, running a U3A
course.
If we want to be interesting and interested, we have to be brave enough to step forward and
offer ourselves whenever and wherever there is a need. This certainly requires courage, in
the sense of not worrying about how we look to other people, and whether we will be snubbed
and whether people will appreciate what we do and whether we may do it all wrong. Maybe
you have all these doubts about running a course, but we are all in this together and at our
ages we know that not everyone is perfect in what they do. So we do not expect polished,
professional courses. Just keen leaders of a group of same-minded people. The real secret of
being interesting and interested is to be so keen on having a go that we forget all about
ourselves. We just get on with it doing the best we can.
If we want to be interesting and interested we have to be prepared to face up to life as it is,
and do what we can with it in a practical way, not just wish and dream that it were different.
We have to keep trying with what we have and what we are, not allowing the world to “get us
down” thus becoming apathetic, indifferent and defeated, the very reverse of interesting and
interested.
If we want to be interesting and interested we will not allow ourselves to get stuck in any hard
and fast routine. We are retired now and we do not have to stick to routine. We are FREE of
having to do certain things at certain times (O.K taking my wife a cup of tea before she will get
up doesn’t count. That’s a habit of over 50 years!) We must do our best to vary what we do
and how we do it, and give ourselves scope for experiment. Do something new. That makes
life interesting and us interested.
If you want to be interesting and interested it will help all round to have a change now and
then, to be different and do something different. This is the way to freshen ourselves as well
as the people close to us. Perhaps a couple of interesting courses will stop us from becoming
fed-up, cross and bored with each other and our lives from becoming colourless and jaded.
But to offer the above we need people who will take the plunge and facilitate a course or two.
Are you prepared to be interested and interesting?