All we can hope for is purpose and meaning. When hope turns into expectation or entitlement it can only lead to disappointment.
In my privileged, bucolic, middle class utopia on the rural fringe of a Kentish village, I have encountered many local acquaintances and friends passing my front garden going for dog walks, daily exercise or family bike rides over the last few weeks of lockdown. In most of our socially distanced conversations about isolation, most of us have declared our happiness and contentment with a strengthened, albeit socially distanced, community; my London commuting friends are loving the lack of train commute and most people I know (definitely not a representative sample of the whole of society) are enjoying the advantages of this peculiar situation and happily ignoring the disadvantages. Some of them, possibly me as well, hope this new, simpler, less relentless way of life lasts for a long time. If there is a God, he or she was middle class and lived in the countryside. This pandemic may be teaching us that the urbanisation of the last two hundred years may be coming towards an accelerated end…
There are of course some things I will miss out on this summer (postponed WOMAD and Black Deer music festivals to name but two) and the lockdown has further complicated a complicated and hopeless situation for my lonely, isolated, elderly mother down in Devon. There have been family tensions too and the five of us have had to make adjustments and find new meaning and purpose in order to get through the unfamiliar strain of being together ALL the time…
I am extremely fortunate in that I love walking and cycling through the countryside, I love gardening and I love writing and I’m really enjoying experimenting with writing a novel. My teaching life is busy too, working for a non-selective independent school (which has reduced its summer term fees by 25%, but still obviously needs to meet the high expectations of parents choosing to pay for their children’s education) means that we have needed to gold plate our home based educational provision. I’ve been teaching live lesson intros for Year 6, 7 & 8, running small group tutorials and discussions and setting open ended assignments and feeding back to children via Microsoft teams. For the majority of children their education has been continuing apace. Some are struggling with the process and I, personally, am looking forward to some outdoor science learning in our beautiful grounds with year 6 after half-term. I am fortunate, and I do not worry about the safety of myself or the children in my educational setting.
I understand the fear and concerns of many people in our current situation, even if I cannot fully empathise with everything I read and hear about. I wonder if some of the fear of returning to school is driven by hope. Hope for a fairer education system. Hope for a less scrutinised, measured and compared education system. Hope for a fairer society. Hope for a greener society. Hope for a less divided society. Hope for a simpler, easier, less transitory life.
I hope for all these things too. But I don’t think government or policy can fix all our hopes and dreams. There is no political or economic system in the world which works effectively for 100% of a population. Some systems are fairer and better for a greater proportion of their populous than ours has been since Thatcherism in the 1980s made us into a more individualistic and selfish nation than we already were. But there is no holy grail. There will always be compromise, there will always be the balancing of conflicting risks, there will always be people who think their belief system or politics is more right than someone else’s, there will always be mistakes.
Where I think hope can be problematic is that we all hope for a long and healthy life, we all hope to be treated fairly, we all hope for a prosperous retirement, we all hope for happy, loving relationships and many of us hope for too many material possessions or dream holidays. Our mass marketed modern world has duped us into converting these hopes into our basic human rights.
But all we can really hope for is there to be meaning and purpose to our lives. This is really hard in a media infested world. We are constantly being told what to believe and what is normal that many of us have lost the ability to think for ourselves, to realise that we and not the government, or our boss, or our spouse, or the media can have some control over our lives. And we have to generate that for ourselves, guided by the wisdom of our parents, our friends, our teachers, our colleagues and other caring members of our families and local communities.
That is my greatest hope from all of this. That we remember we can be beautiful people living in a beautiful place, closely connected to our communities and the nature which surrounds us. I hope, more than anything, that we – collectively – realise that our Western globalised and economically driven cultures have drifted so far from the natural order of things that we have forgotten that nature can sometimes be cruel and we have no human right to transcend it.
Let hope enable purpose and meaning but please don’t let hope turn into expectation or entitlement. Because that form of hope can only ever lead to disappointment.
CREducATE 