I had a brilliant finish to my week, leading another two-day coaching workshop at United World College, here in Singapore. I enjoy these experiences each time I have them and each group of aspiring coaches is unique. One of the really powerful things that has been set up at UWC, is the fact that the coaching cohort is a complete mix of different members of the school community. In the last couple of days I have been working with a medical professional, a gym coach, an early years teacher, IB teachers, a data analyst, some IT professionals, a Boarding House parent…it was almost the perfect operational cross section. Why is this so important? The answer lies in the way that we introduce ourselves – we engage as who we are rather than what we do. We see each other as parents, athletes, musicians, writers before we add functional labels to our discourse. The result? One significant limiting opportunity for projection – what my job is – removed from the point of first contact. People’s jobs aren’t a secret, it’s just not who they are.
There is a powerful message in not segregating professional learning in educational institutions into ‘us and them’. It isn’t always practicable or relevant but with a bit of effort much learning can be available to access for everyone. When 14 people mix for two days to learn a skill together they create a bond. Where once their connection was tenuous or non existent, now they will catch up in the coffee bar or by the water coolers, they will introduce others to their new connections…the soak out effect of shared adult learning changes the culture of an organisation and sends a really strong message of inclusion to those who don’t always expect that the advertised banquet is for them.
The gratitude I feel to be part of these moments was intensified this week by a personal rush of appreciation stimulated by loss. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone (Carly Simon, written in a hotel room in Hawaii to mourn the march of concrete over a paradise island). What I lost this week was the use of my left wrist, which was unceremoniously encased in quick drying fibreglass after a hand specialist (yes there are even wrist specialists, which I think must be dull…) diagnosed that I had broken my Scaphoid Bone. Scaphoid comes from the Greek word for boat and it appears that we all have tiny ferry boats in our wrists that connect the proximal and distal rows of our carpal bones. This may not enlighten you to any great extent but suffice to say that it’s a tiny but significant constituent of the boney community of the wrist.
How this happened was a betrayal of classic tragedy proportions. Et tu Brute, I might well have cried out, as the tiny ringer of my bicycle bell stabbed me perniciously and with forensic accuracy in the left scaphoid as I lurched from my bicycle at high speed on a sandy cormer of the East Coast Park. I will hurry past my own accountability for the accident and not mention that I was cycling too fast in the dark, late for an important Board meeting because compulsive me had needed to reach my normal turnaround point but had not left enough time to do so. No, the blame is entirely heaped onto the bicycle bell, shame on you, after all these years of trusting companionship.
So I really didn’t know that I had a scaphoid until it was gone but now I really do. Without knowing it, I had something that allowed me to pick up the kettle, that allowed me to shower without keeping my left arm above my head, that allowed me not to spray deodorant in my face by accident. With a scaphoid, you can applaud people, unscrew jars and wine bottles, do some push ups; with a scaphoid you can text with two thumbs, do up your own shoe laces…and ride a bicycle. Take a moment to appreciate that you can do these things: a blessing on scaphoids everywhere….
For all of us, it’s been a year of appreciating what we’ve lost and perhaps once took for granted. My wife and I had fallen into a rather entitled habit of looking at a map of the world and being mildly irritated that we couldn’t think of where to go on holiday. Now I would give my other scaphoid just for a road trip to Jahore. Like so many others, I haven’t seen my family for nearly two years and will be a stranger to some of my young great nephews and nieces when I see them. Those stimulating two days of coaching, that began this blog, were conducted with a piece of material strapped over my mouth and secured around my ears – there’s something I never thought to do. It will be nice to free our faces when the moment arrives.
So before it’s gone, I do appreciate so much of what I have. Health, gifted and loving people around me, a roof to live under, chocolate. Whether I will disrespectfully allow my scaphoid to shrink back into obscurity when it’s no longer preventing me from tearing open packets of my favourite almonds, time will tell. Whether any of us will stop taking for granted all of the things we have lost and crave deeply or whether we will still yet allow all the trees to be taken to a tree museum, remains to be seen in the life after.
