The door

Schools might appear to be funny places. As the door (secret or otherwise) opened on a new term at Embley, the potential of this new beginning is met with a degree of novelty that lasts about a heartbeat before it feels like we have never been away.

Perhaps it is the same everywhere and we are not nearly so unique as we would like to think. Two weeks in and this, the first of my posts of the term and the calendar year, is being revised to the chorus of children enjoying play time at lunch. Not so much an oasis of peace and quiet but a deer worrying symphony of wonder. It continues to be a delight and while I might wonder about the wisdom of play on grass that cold and wet, they don’t seem to mind.

We began just over two weeks ago with some thoughts and reflection on, not so much what the year ahead might bring, but on how we might navigate it. I suggested three ideas to the children which they might consider and perhaps you might consider with them at some point? I’m a bit reluctant to call them resolutions because they so often fail, and I don’t want these ideas not to survive beyond the third week. 

In the first instance, I wondered if it might be worth being more Hopeful. Interesting one isn’t it? I have always taken the view that optimism is a choice. Presented with a scenario there is a moment or more before action wherein you decide mentally how you might take it or respond. In conversation with a parent recently, I shared an experience of hearing three soldiers checking out of a hotel and enjoying the fact that while from three different nationalities, they were united in a choir of complaint. They complained about the equipment, the task, the vehicles and much more but time and my check out spared me the litany. The parent explained that complaining is the soldier’s lot and part of the package; you might worry if they are not complaining. To my mind I wondered what was being achieved. That might be the problem, maybe the complaining was catharsis enough and the soldiers never wanted a solution. Seems miserable but maybe it works. 

I take a different view and suggest the children ought to as well. Why not be hopeful and optimistic? Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus saw Hope as the greatest of all evils because it encouraged inaction. I don’t see it like that. Optimism allows the view that people’s actions may well be for the best, that they may seek our good and that in any case they deserve the benefit of the doubt. OK, it doesn’t apply in all cases all of the time but sufficient to make it a useful way of going about the day. It challenges the wink and elbow language of social media suggestion and the numbskullery that buys into collective populist conclusions without thought. It also guards against an insularity that makes us hyperconscious of criticism and looks, that at every glance appear as a death stare, when for the most part other people are too engrossed in regarding themselves to regard us at all.

The second disposition I suggested worth cultivating was Honesty. A ruthless and robust intellectual and emotional honesty with ourselves. There are things I do well and things I don’t, they do not make the sum of me nor equate to my worth but too often it is taken as so. Where that is the case, being brutally honest is a bridge too far because it threatens my worth as an individual, mistaken as this is, it is nevertheless the case for many children and adults I might add. Imagine that level of honesty that allows us to appreciate ourselves as we are. It rids us of the need to pretend or the desire to be something other, the better to fit in or belong. I have mentioned here and elsewhere that if I have to be like you to be here, I fit in, if I can be me and be here, I belong. The difference is massive and vital. Consider the liberation to be had from relaxing into one’s authentic self and freeing oneself from the tyranny of what people might say?

The final disposition I suggested for the children was to be Open. Again, an interesting notion. If we always do what we always did, we get a reducing benefit and find ourselves in a very convenient and cosy rut. OK, there is the embracing of novelty for its own sake; that has some merit but it will depend on what the novelty is. The disposition to be open means saying yes to experiences we may feel not suitably qualified for or through our self-regard feel we are not ready for or not right for. Time and experience will tell but you won’t get experience if you don’t try. My old compatriot Louis MacNeice has that lovely line, “by a high start our course is set, our end is life, put out to sea”. The open door that greeted the new year invites us to step through, to embrace possibility and challenge norms and the accepted conclusions we too easily settle down to. In stepping through it and putting out to sea, we venture into the unknown but where else are we to find the experience and stimuli, the context and courage to become what we are? So the challenge is set fair; be hopeful, be honest, be open. The door beckons us all…