Question
to self: Why am I here?
That’s not a Darwin orientated question. I used to know why I was here. I used to be confident in my purpose. I knew how I was of service. I knew my duty. I was an educator, and for over half my career a headmaster, sometimes of more than
one school at once. My purpose was to provide and engender in young folk, and
often older ones, curiousity, knowledge, a moral code, a feeling of self-worth
and a ‘can do’ attitude, without fear of failure, and if the result was to fail,
to learn why they failed and get on and do it right or do it different. And the curiousity must be of the thirsty
type, and broad, with the ability to look at things objectively, with a
critical eye, and appreciate both truth and beauty.
I tried to encourage and engender friendships which give and don’t
just take, and focused on stamping out ‘isms’ and ‘phobias – racism, sexism,
Islamophobia and most, xenophobia - and especially in the last 10 years give
children and teachers direction and, by God, hope where little or none had been
before!
I could go on forever, but that’s not my point. The point is that my purpose which made Monday
my favourite day and contributed to the breakup of several relationships and a
couple of marriages isn’t there anymore.
So, why am I still here? How do I
serve? What is my purpose?
I had contemplated retirement with absolute horror, but in the
end I was lucky in a peculiar way. I
stayed an extra term to fight off Gormless Gove who had decided to personally intervene
in my last school’s status. It’s too
complicated and irrelevant to detail here but I won. It was hard though, and I had already wrecked
myself by a couple of years earlier not
having an operation until much later than recommended because the particular
school I was mostly with was in a bad place, as was the other one I was also working
with. As they improved, I got to be great at wielding a crutch! And then the time came when they were secure. I was operated on. I was meant to have 7
weeks off, I went back after a week.
Stupid, I know, but it was my duty because I was defined by what
I did. I was a headmaster, and headmasters don’t duck their duty, or at least
they shouldn’t. Anyway, this meant by the
time I left I had started to believe doctors who had told me for several years
that I needed to quit because I was killing myself. I knew I wasn’t. Not quite, but as I left my last school, and
stopped being a headmaster, I was too tired to care. Like I said, I was lucky.
It was like a holiday at first, and old friends from time to
time asked for help. I also worked on
analysing complex data for schools … I was a whiz at teasing info from spread
sheets the size of football fields and turning what I found into action
points. How sad is that! And I did a bit of leadership training, way
outside of my old stomping ground, and it was satisfying, and new. And increasingly I was writing.
And we came to Kerlanguet. And
I’ve been here five years. And I’ve kept on writing.
And reading and thinking. And I’m
paid for doing whatever I want. And I don’t know my purpose!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not depressed. I’m not unhappy. I know that I am extraordinarily lucky. I used to get up at 5.30 or earlier. Now the alarm is set for 7.00. I deliberately don’t set it on Monday to let
it be my favourite day in another way – partly because I partake of the grape
on Sundays!
Being paid for not working means every day is mine, to do with
as I wish, as long as I am not absurdly extravagant. I live in a lovely area, in a cracking
country, in a lovely house, with a lovely and loving wife. I have my beasties around me and a book lined
study to call my own. I have time to think the long thoughts of an oak tree, to write
at my leisure and pleasure … But I don’t know my purpose!
What am I contributing? Who am I
helping? How do I serve? What is my duty?
I’m an ex-headmaster.
What’s the use in that? I still
got cries for help and such like when I came here and eventually I cut out of
my life all those folk, and they were wonderful folk, nearly all of them, who’d
followed me and then worked beside me as they grew. I stopped answering emails. I unfriended 10 years of my life on Facebook,
the 10 most challenging, most satisfying, nearly killed me years.
It wasn’t because I didn’t care, it was because I cared too much
and could no longer fulfil the duty of headmaster, Consultant, School Improvement
Partner or Ofsted Inspector. Nor could I
fulfil my central duty of Care. Care has
a big C because that’s what it was. If
you’re a headmaster, at least like I was, you have not only up to 1000 kids in
your care, you have a couple of hundred adults or so. In some ways the numbers don’t matter. The situation does.
Your prime task is the teaching and learning. You’d hope that
you’d spend the majority of your time helping to improve the former, to give
better quality for the latter. Hope! A happy school is generally a good school, though
there are, of course exceptions. Basically
headmastering is about people, large, small, young, old, your school
community. Headmasters set the direction
and the weather in the school.
As headmaster you may need to make sure staff have secure rooms
in their homes in case there is a gas or chemical attack, because maybe lots of
wise people knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction but we didn’t,
and the British and American Embassy staff and Ambassadors didn’t either, and
as a Warden I was briefed on this by military personnel who apparently knew their
stuff.
You have to find a secure room within a school which will be
safe for hundreds of children and all the staff, and you need to make sure the
latter all have flights before the war kicks off. You have to juggle millions of dollars or
pounds, to get the best deal for kids and staff. (You need a good bursar!) You need to get the SAS in for advice on securing
the school compound because it has become a named terrorist target.
You have to fire people, which stinks, and you become a bit of
an ‘Agony Aunt’. My colleagues and quite
often parents, would come to me about marital problems, (Yep, I told them I
wasn’t very good at it!) How to get
divorced; how to organise a funeral – I had to attend an Hindu, open casket
funeral as the ‘patriarch’ in the life of one teaching assistant whose husband
had died and she had no family elders in the country. Remarkably he looked very well!
There were problems between staff, people who needed help with
monetary difficulties and, cliché though it is, often mother-in-law interfering
problems. They came needing all sorts of
legal advice - I had a hot-line to the
Citizens Advice Bureau! (Well, I didn’t,
but I should have. And I did always have
a lawyer’s number handy.) There were
problems with their kids; there were problems with access to health care, broken cars,
breaking relationships, forced marriage – managed to stop two - marrying across
religious divides … and on and on.
And there were the kids. Front and centre. Where to begin? Okay, I took over a new school, the previous head having left after he had a nervous breakdown after
one too many of the parents gave him a smacking and then bit him through his
shirt and nearly ripped a nipple off! I kept a rounders bat by my desk, but never needed it, though I
did quite often have to go in the playgrounds at the end of the day and stop
fights …involving parents.
I’d only been there a couple of days when a little Somali girl
was brought to my attention. She was 9 and kept attacking the oldest boys and beating the
crap out of them. Really savage. She also wouldn’t talk to any male teachers. I asked what her problem was and nobody knew so I had her Mum in and a translator. She’d seen her father and brother hacked to
death, her mother raped, and older sister gang raped, and then she’d
been raped, at that time aged 7. She had a bit of a down on men – obviously.
(As an aside, don’t talk to me about “bloody immigrants should
go back to their own countries.”)
There have been kids who have wealthy, well-educated parents
committing emotional abuse by being over-controlling, and parents who were
money rich but time poor, who tried to buy their kids affection. There have been kids who were with a single
parent who was racist as hell but had three other kids, all of different
colours! No colour in bed
apparently! Kids whose Mums are hookers
and dads in jail. Kids with both parents
drug addicts, alcoholics, you name it …
There were 2 young girls whose father told how he kept watching
TV shows late at night which were the government interfering and telling him to
do obscene things to his children. I had
to threaten to take the Local Authority to court before they intervened. They did but what a ghastly business.
There were father and son housebreakers, (2) the son going
through a small window and letting his dad in.
In the schools I was headmaster in during the last 10 years there was a
violent death of a member of the school community at least once a year, and
suicides. My learning how to make a
school compound secure in Kuwait came in handy so there was no problem, for
instance, putting the school in lockdown when a violent husband and his gang
traced his wife and child to a Refuge and knew they would be coming to school.
In that school I had a senior member of staff who did no teaching
or anything to do with what you’d normally consider a teacher’s role. He spent all the time dealing with Social
Services, and a group of colleague heads and I got together and employed 6
full-time psychologists between us because the Local Authority was broke and
couldn’t provide these much needed folk for our kids.
In a lovely leafy-laned school where I was head many years ago,
we had a little girl who died of AIDS at the age of 7. She’d been born with it. Well-to-do parents who were also intravenous
drugs users. Later in my career I used
to employ local bouncers at school fetes to get rid of the undesirables, especially
the drug dealers.
There were kids who were regularly in trouble with the police and
had the odd habit of throwing furniture at teachers. All staff there were trained in methods of
restraint, working in pairs. There were
kids whose clothes we washed and who we gave a free breakfast too in
school. We fed a fair few during the
holidays too. There were also kids whose
parents were travellers, who would not claim anything from the state, so got no
free school meals and when they were broke I used to pay for their lunches
until we took over our own kitchens and factored in to the price. Hungry, smelly kids don’t make good
learners. I could go on with this
forever, but you get the picture. I
could make a difference. I could serve. I had a purpose.
So, yep, there were lots of problems, and I was hugely privileged
that the parents and kids, one way or another brought them to me, and I did my
damnedest to help them, and get them the support they needed. I don’t do that anymore. I can’t.
It’s odd. When you’re a suited
and booted headmaster you can open doors to support much more than you’d
think. And if you’re a suited and booted
headmaster in a deprived area, and, ridiculously, you have a certain kind of
accent, you can get, generally hugely overworked in such areas, Social Services
folk, Doctors, Policemen, Parole Officers and Magistrates to lend an ear with
regard to the kids and their parents, many of whom were troubled. I can’t do any of that now. So … just what is my bloody purpose?
How do I justify my existence now? Am I just an old man, some sort of decadent
sybarite,
duty-less and purposeless, slowly drifting into further physical
decline before partaking in the next, exciting journey? Nowadays I take but give nothing back. I am of service to no one. I contribute nothing. I
improve nobody’s life chances. What’s
more I am now unemployable as a headmaster except in certain niche or elite circumstance. Too old.
I could do consultancy work, and with a bit of catch-up training
do Ofsteds’ but I’d have no credibility as far as I’m concerned because I’m no
longer a headmaster, walking the walk. There are loads – probably the majority – of consultants and
inspectors who aren’t heads but I wouldn’t really have the brass neck to stand
in judgement of a school if I didn’t have one of my own. The bits of work I did after I first retired
was for friends. Now I’m no longer in touch
with them. My choice. So, I say again, what’s my purpose?
I do write, it’s true, and occasionally I please a few folk on
FB with my latest and random scribblings, and that is truly gratifying and
affirming, but the truth is that anything that could be described as even
vaguely purposeful, approximately at least half a million words of it, (Some
them actually making sense!) I don’t
really try to get published probably because I’m frightened of rejection. It’s a kind of Catch 22.
I can write purposefully, and what I write is meant to entertain
but also, in different ways, teach, but the more I feel purposeless, the more I
don’t believe my work - and it is work, requiring significant time, effort and commitment - has what it
takes to do what it is meant to do, be read, enjoyed and learned from by – Hell,
let’s think big – countless millions of people. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, and
not only have I been chicken but it is possible nobody will want my work, and
that would negate any raggle-arse purpose I have left!
I did dip my toe in the water a while ago, but hadn’t realised
that things had changed since my last foray, long ago, into the publishing
world. They seem to do one of three
things with a manuscript. One, they tell you it’s no good. I haven’t had that. Two, they tell you they’ll put in, let’s say,
20k if you put in, say 2k and they’ll publish a certain amount and see how it
goes – hedging their bets. I’ve had
several of those. The other is, they’ll
publish. I’ve had none of those and
those are the only terms I would accept. That would be / is my Condition One. Condition Two is that I can use a pseudonym.
I’ve also learned that it is probably a good
idea to get yourself an agent who specialises in your genre and knows the ropes
… so I have just sent off one manuscript to two publishers and one agent. Sometimes – though rarely – they say that it
could be a year before you hear anything! They advise that in the interim you keep
writing. Well, it’s a start, anyway, and
I will.
Also, here’s a strange thing, though it has no
possibility of service or doing one’s duty, at least to others, I do feel a
sense of (selfish) purpose in learning. I
don’t mean learning, as in the MOOCs I do about anything I fancy, or learning
about the world politically, as I do somewhat obsessively at times, I mean
learning for, I suppose, enlightenment.
I’m not sure it is spiritual
enlightenment. Maybe though. Up to a point my broader spiritual needs and
curiousity are served by the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Dallas where
I attend regularly, on-line, and particularly enjoy the intellectual content of
the sermons which are as likely to refer to the Buddha, Shakespeare or the
wonderfully named, Hosea Ballou as the prophet Jesus, and where many of the
community, like me, don’t know anything about God other than it is loving, and
don’t presume to know more, being more interested in making ‘heaven’ on Earth, getting
on out there and trying to make the world a better place, be it through their
work, on protest marches, writing – whatever skills they can use to help make a
positive difference. As I used to.
So, going back to my (selfishly) purposeful
learning for enlightenment, I have been hugely interested in reincarnation, reading
research from places as far apart as Harvard, Stanford, Edinburgh and the University of Adelaide in, and
have really ‘bought in’ to the reincarnation work and evidence base of Dr. Ian Stevenson and the University of
Virginia’s School Of Medicine. I am
convinced.
What has also gripped me is trying to understand
consciousness, and the more I learn of quantum mechanics, quantum physics, superpositioning,
and especially entangled particles, the more I feel I may be onto something. This instant communication between entangled
particles, no matter how far apart they are, is not only extraordinary but it
also disproves Einstein’s theory of relativity, since they do move
faster than the speed of light.
The relativity of time, even within the amalgam of
space/time, knocks on the head one of the 4 dimensions, and really since the
time of Ancient Greek philosophers the other three have been ‘suspect’ and
relative. So there is in many ways a
tabula rasa when one seeks meaning within our marvelous universe and the
possibility that consciousness/soul is not just within our heads but may be
everywhere, linked through entangled particles to trees, alien beings, the
heart of stars, the poor, the dying, those being born, and may too be spread
across time. And then there’s the
seductive ‘logic’ of Robert Lanza’s biocentrism!
It is fascinating and it is most assuredly
purposeful learning …but it is selfish and serves nobody, and even if I made
some real breakthrough in understanding, it is most likely that a) people
wouldn’t be interested or that b) people with partial understanding, prejudices
or even greater knowledge would only want to shoot it
down, and therefore c) in the ‘fog’ nobody would believe it! Except me.
And perhaps an enlightened me would find other ways
to have purpose, to serve, to be useful, to help make ‘heaven on Earth’ or whatever. I guess with all of it, I’ll have to wait, and
seek, and learn and throw away preconceptions, and then we’ll see. Or not, as
the case may be.
Watch this space.
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