I’ve been considering what to do with this Activate Learning blog.

Should I close it down?

Should I rename and redesign it?

Should I start a new one as Life Lessons from Books?

However, the more I think about it, the more I realise that “activate learning” is a useful generic “catch-all” phrase that could mean whatever you want it to mean.

This blog has been a collection of thoughts, projects, photos, videos and curations of everything I’ve been doing, building, reflecting and learning about over the years.

So closing it down is akin to putting an end to everything I’ve done over the last ten or more years.

(Certainly, when I closed down my other social media, I saw that it had effectively deleted everything that I had shared through many years online. Now, as it’s archived and private – for my eyes only).

If I close down this blog too, it means I will be shutting down a body of work decades in the making – which I don’t want of course! 🤣

Not when the best years are those that are ahead of me…

So I read somewhere that our retirement is where we become the people we were meant to be before work, family and life beat it out of us…Maybe it’s time for me to break out of some old thinking patterns and start taking on new ones. Become less belligerent and Luddite in my views and go with the flow with the new views of technology and society?

No doubt about it, I’ve spent the last few years bumming around. I think it’s safe to say that the years post-work have been a period of intense reflection and evolution for me. A time when I had to clear the shit that I had in my brain of people telling me what I ‘should’ be doing and instead, to get back to a little bit of ‘me’ to come to terms with what exactly I was put on this world to do.

In the last few years, I’ve been dabbling with no idea about ‘what’s next’ in this next phase of life. Also much of it ‘waiting’.

Waiting for my husband to retire so that there’s some plan about how to make use of this time together, to travel and plan our future together.

So while I’ve been waiting, I’ve been delving into French, joined a golf club by going through a 3-month Women Into Golf Program (where all the women now are my new friends for the rest of my life), joined the Heritage Committee with the golf club and also started a Bookclub at the golf club too. In between all that, I look after my parents and do general housekeeping, catching up with friends, etc.

So far, so good.

These are activities that don’t take much time for me but I do miss endeavours that allow me to creatively express myself. Something that’s fun, not too time-consuming but also makes me a little bit of passive income.

That’s why I am now looking at my YouTube channel Life Lessons from Books as that creative project. Let’s call it my “Hobby Business” .

In some way, I’d like to give this a go since my first attempt at building my consulting company failed abysmally. Maybe this time, at least I can make make enough to be able to buy myself some new books or even a new laptop through my efforts on the channel?

Most of all, I want to just give it a go and have some fun with it. In the old days, I enjoyed social media because it connected me to a group of people who I could share lessons, recommendations and learn from and now I’m finding that YouTube, (although is a social media) is a way that I can also control what I see. All comments are moderated and in some way, people who watch and share their thoughts, are sharing their experiences and recommendations of books so I’ve been also learning and finding about new books to read from their responses.

I’ve decided to give building my YouTube channel a go as the next step and to change my thinking about a lot of things.

Already, I’ve broken my old boundaries of not sharing anything about Amazon or things I used to hold valuable to me. I’ve realised, through my YouTube comments, that many people around the world, don’t have bookstores near or around them. Many rely on Amazon and other online delivery methods to get their beloved books. So, I’ve had to put my own feelings aside about this platform and I created an Amazon store front with some affiliate links as well as a Kofi Donations page.

My plan for the time being is to continue doing what I love – READING and then creating these short videos and building the channel over time. I understand that as a book channel, it’s not going to make much income but that’s okay. For now, it’s a bit of fun and it allows me to be creative so I think I’ll continue with that.

In the meantime, I’m also writing short stories and submitting them to various competitions and online sites but in all honesty, video creation seems what I prefer to do than the creative writing – and I had to finally admit this to myself because video creation gets me out and about – which I love – as opposed to sitting in front of a computer with a blank page in front of me stuck indoors (which I feel I have been inside for too long)…

My Amazon Store Front

https://www.amazon.com/shop/lifelessonsfrombooks

Kofi Donations

https://ko-fi.com/lifelessonsfrombooks

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