You are now leaving the comfort zone.

I turned 50 not all too long ago, and turning 50 is definitely the age where, even by a far stretch, you cannot define yourself as „young“ anymore, except perhaps at a party for centennarians. And I’ve noticed something strange happening to me: I am finding it hard to motivate myself to learn new stuff.

My tax advisor recently changed me over to an online tool for my monthly accounting. I was mortified. I tried to find all kinds of excuses to not have to learn the tricks of yet another web-based tool, including not returning my accountant’s calls. Eventually, there was no escaping and I had to start using the software. It took me a whole day to get the hang of it. Internally, I was throwing a major tantrum and stomping my foot. Externally, I pretended not to understand. But when I ran out of excuses and actually started using the new system, suddenly doing my accounts became a fun spiel I quite enjoy rather than the tiresome task it had always been, and I am (quite sadly) now done in five minutes.

It pays off to leave your comfort zone and learn something new, despite all that internal resistance that I can feel building up. I guess, the more I give in to the temptation of sticking with the already-familiar, the greater that hurdle to tackling something new will be. I can feel the discomfort creeping in in every aspect of my life: I have finally „found my style“ in fashion. In other words, I am too uncomfortable trying something new that I stick to variations of the exact same outfit formula every day. I am no longer adventurous enough to order anything else than my standard dish every time we go to our favourite restaurant (not to mention not trying new ones, especially not if that were to involve having to look up how to get there!). I love returning to a familiar place for our holidays, and „meeting new people“ no longer sounds like a thrilling experience, but more like an unbelievably cumbersome chore.

So why did I decide to buy a ticket straight out of my cozy little comfort zone – and enrol in a course of studies again?

Because keeping your brain busy is the best prevention for dementia, and your brain runs familiar tasks on idle. You need to gear up and challenge your brain if you don’t want it to atrophy into fuddy-duddyism early. Ideally, you should teach it some new moves – learning a new dance is the ultimate anti-brain-ageing-strategy, where you have to coordinate, listen, learn a choreography by heart etc.). However, for people born with two left feet and no sense of rhythm like me, I thought studying art history may be a tad more appropriate.

So here I go, stretching my brain to (re-)learning how to sign up for classes, how to use public transport (believe it or not), put together a course plan and get hold of the course scripts; how to talk to strangers, how to find your class room, and as the cherry on the icing: Take a few tests. Wish me luck.

The wonderful German tradition of the „Schultüte“. I’ll treat you to a blog post on Schultüten next time.