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.