Put out to sea | Embley, Private School Hampshire

Now readers of this piece will be very familiar with my lack of familiarity with much that is contemporary in popular culture. To be fair to me, I would make a decent argument that much of what passes for popular culture doesn’t meet the threshold to be called cultural, but that is for another day. Term began last week and I thought it might be opportune with exams season looming and the media notes on anxiety in children to dwell with them for a while on ways they might mitigate the worry. There is much copy written about stress and anxiety; I would argue that an anxiety free life is not a realistic nor reasonable expectation. As human beings stress and anxiety are responses to circumstance, but response that we have the capacity to mitigate. I’m advocating a via media where we learn to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

In the allegory of the cave, Plato sets out a representation of a fundamental bind we as humans find ourselves in. The connection between ourselves and the world. What is really Real against what is ephemeral, illusory and imagined. This is rich ground for consideration. Do we perceive the world as it really is or merely as the objects of sensation present it to us? The prisoners shackled to the floor of the cave and gazing at the shadows dancing on the wall take what they see as the world, not realising until their eyes are turned that there is in fact a Real world beyond the shadows. You might take the allegory further and relate it to the experience of living vicariously on social media, captivated by those shadows dancing on a virtual wall and accept what one perceives to be real. What effect does it have? My thinking is that because it invites the participant to disengage with what is authentic and Real, the virtual world creates a world of mental shadows, illusions that create anxiety. 
 
In making decisions, I tabled the notion that if the process of decision making is taking away peace of mind, if the decision finally taken is creating angst, then you probably can’t afford it. There is a massive tension between choosing for oneself and choosing to ‘fit in’. ‘Everyone is doing it’ is no more a reasonable reason than the prisoners looking around the cave and thinking ‘this is it guys’. It is perfectly acceptable to live a life others do not understand, it’s not their life. I often hear students ask if it is ‘weird’ to do such and such. It may be weird, whatever that means, but if it means unusual, if it means unique, if it means individual then doesn’t that change the tone of understanding the decision? Weird carries a judgement that unique doesn’t. Don’t take critiques form those you wouldn’t ask for advice.
 
I also wonder if some of the imaginings of today come from a notion that achieving my goals should be easier than it seems. There is a routine tension in the conscientious to think the task may be beyond them. In others, a condescension that the task is beneath them. In either case, if there are goals to be achieved, they start with action of some sort, I don’t really think it matters too much what that action is, but it begins the process. If there is no sacrifice for what you want, then what you want is sacrificed. Action even in the smallest of steps is movement to the goal and incrementally gets us out of the cave of our solitary imaginings. Speaking of actions - I did challenge my audience to consider what people might think are our priorities if they could see what we do but not hear why we do it. 
 
To return to the allegory - that those prisoners who don’t move, fail to notice their limitations - if you don’t move, you don’t notice your chains and your world wraps closer and closer around you, diminishing perspective. Last evening’s Sixth Form Nightingale Lecture speaker, Dr Georgia Cole, invited us to think about a time where an experience led us to change our mind about something. It was more difficult than the audience thought. I found myself going back some years. To what extent are we open to making ourselves purposefully uncomfortable, the better to challenge our thinking, grow our understanding and look for the light at the mouth of the cave? Ships are protected in harbours but it’s not what they are for. Encouraging appropriate risk taking challenges the chains that bind and liberates our authentic human spirit. We are not designed for caves of our imaginings or to be prisoners of worry. This is not a recipe for bliss but a suggestion that helps mitigate unnecessary anxiety. Risking taking a single step to be authentic, ignoring the pull to fit in, refusing to compromise our peace with illusory promise - these are steps to authenticity that dispel the demons of doubt. I’m with MacNeice:

   By a high star our course is set
   Our end is life
   Put out to sea