Every single night, I dream about school.
Despite the fact that it’s been close to two years since schools were my everyday world, my tenure endures and flowers in a dream world of nightly adventures. Sometimes, these days, I need to wake up for a break.
For the most part these adventures are less harrowing than the worst events from my remembered reality. My dream schools – which reconfigure themselves every night – are sometimes places that I’ve known and at other times curious constructs built from scraps.
No longer the dreams that I remember since childhood of being late for things: exams, meetings, buses, assemblies, just about anything for which you can feel stress about being late. In their place, this new nocturnal career plays out. The enduring feeling, in the morning, is that I have been part of something significant and communal once more – which is perhaps what I miss the most.
I haven’t written a blog for a little while because I’ve been reflecting on the value that blogging adds. I’ve wondered whether my writing does more than simply add to the torrent, to the raging flood that is the relentless flow of media on LinkedIn and Twitter. Does dropping our contributions into these storm drains serve any purpose other than to add to the fulminating spate?
In my imagination, the blogs bob around for a while in the white water, the more buoyant writing staying afloat a little longer than the words I produce with leaden serifs. Eventually all words, whether impactful or irrelevant, disappear from view and drown, their saturated corpses flowing out through the refuge strewn deltas of media effluent, finally to be lost at sea where they are eaten by the lexicon fish.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter a jot whether we add our noise to the already deafening roar of words and images or not. The digital river is indifferent, it broils and spumes and whirls away; 365, 24/7. I think many of us are actually so intimidated by the flood that we avoid it altogether. The relentless flow serves to remind us how out of touch we are, how little we know, how far behind other people we are. Rather than informing us, it helps to confirm what imposters we are.
So for a while I stopped adding to the fulminating firmament. Have I been besieged by distraught messages calling out for my absent opinions? I have not. But I’ve been thinking about something specific over the past few weeks, inspired by a number of eerily similar coaching conversations.
We are all familiar with the clichéd, anxiety heightening, phrase it’s later than you think – but maybe we are less familiar with the opposing view. It really isn’t later than I think, I know how late it is and if I didn’t know or somehow managed to forget, I’d just have to stick my head back into the digital river to be reminded how we are shortly to burn, freeze, explode, starve, corrupt, bankrupt, spontaneously combust.
It’s earlier than you think
As a coach, I’m very familiar with people imposing excluding boundaries on themselves. It goes like this: ‘there’s no point doing x because of y’. As in: ‘there’s no point in applying for that role because they will want someone younger/ older/ more experienced/ male/ female/ diverse/ taller/ left handed/ catholic/ local/ external/ internal/ more qualified/ less qualified/ multilingual/ extrovert/ who can drink coffee while yodelling….’
Of all of the ingenious ways that people find of counting themselves out of opportunities (and in the process using excluders that they would never use on other people whilst recruiting), the one that sneaks under the radar undetected more than most is the ‘maybe 10 years ago…’ type of thinking.
Let’s just look at 10 years ago. Where was your life 10 years ago? What did you see as ‘possible’ in 2012? What seemed impossible then? How much of what has happened to you since the end of October 2012 was predictable? How much could never have been foreseen?
And one more step back – 10 years ago, what did you think when you looked back to yourself in 1992? If you are now 50, what did your 40 year old self think about your 30 year old self? Did they look back – do you look back and see what would have been possible if you had just not limited yourself, your dreams, your aspirations? What if you hadn’t counted yourself out?
Before you get too lost in bittersweet nostalgia, I have an even harder question. What will your 10 year future self think about you today? If you’re 50, what will you think about you today, when you’re 60?
I can pretty much guarantee that 10 years hence you will look back at your now self as a person who was younger, fitter, stronger, with more opportunities. You won’t be able to stop yourself thinking ‘why didn’t I….?’ And the answer will probably be: ‘because I counted myself out.’
I’m in my 60s now and that may sound old to some but I don’t feel old and I am 100% certain that my 10 year future self will look at my now self and think ‘holy mackerel, you had it all’. And the truth is, I do. I started teaching at 30, ten years after I was supposed to know what I wanted to do with my life; I left my home country to work overseas at 51 when lots of my colleagues were thinking about planning for retirement; I met the love of my life at 54, married at 55, took on the biggest job of my career at 59…what if I had counted myself out of all of these possibilities and opportunities?
Let’s play the tape: it’s too late to start a teaching career now…I’m too old to work abroad, they won’t be interested in me…I’m too old to find love in my 50s…I’m far too old to get married now…that amazing world-famous school won’t want someone of my age….wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
The things I would have missed; the incredible people I would never have met; the joy and the beauty lost.
However old you are today, you can tell yourself that you’re finished or you can tell yourself that you’re just getting started and that’s a choice. If you count yourself out, your ten year future self is going to be mightily mad at you. What a decade of delectable richness waits ahead for you if you just count yourself in. Seriously, what have you got to lose?
Go on, there’s so much still ahead of you, it’s earlier than you think.
