How do you relax?
You might expect it to be really easy to relax when you have finished year round teaching. Actually, it’s the complete opposite. The sheer novelty and uncertainty of the situation makes it very difficult to settle. Now, I know I am in the first week so it’s very early days, but I feel like the transition from lesson planning, teaching and marking is much more difficult than I expected.
Every day I feel like I have to ‘achieve’ something, however small. Now, that’s a pretty good approach in the long run, but at the moment I am not sure how much I am supposed to achieve! I am also very tired both physically and mentally, as you would expect, so I am somewhat restrained by that.
What am I trying to say? I suppose I am trying to say that relaxation is always something I have had to work at, and my new circumstances will be no different. I will try various things and see what works, but until I work out how to relax I won’t be able to relax!! 🤣🤣
If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?
As a lover of words from my childhood and an English teacher for 30 years, the idea of giving up a word is anathema. I have taught my students to expand their vocabulary and make it more nuanced rather than contract their vocabulary and make it less fit for purpose.
George Orwell recognised this in the book 1984 when he invented Newspeak, the restrictive, very easily controlled language of the state. You could argue that we are in a situation with some similarities today as social media and its reduced character count, or its focus on getting the maximum impact in the minimum time and space is moving our languages across the world in that direction.
Let’s just imagine you wanted to remove the word hate from your vocabulary. On the face of it, that’s a laudable aim, but actually it’s just removing your ability, both lingually and cognitively, to express the full range of emotions and ideas you may have. So, you replace hate with loathe, abhor, detest, deeply dislike or take exception to. You now have five words or phrases instead of one and those words are appropriate to a whole range of situations. People will understand more precisely what you mean and you can use those words to give you the platform for a discussion not a shouting match.
So next time you think of cutting out a word, either online or offline, make sure you have at least three or four options to replace it.
Are you holding a grudge? About?
I remember reading somewhere that holding a grudge is like taking poison and expecting to kill someone else! Now, I have been an expert at holding grudges throughout my life. Many of the people I have held grudges against for decades, those I went to school with, have almost certainly not bestowed one thought on me in the intervening years but I have been carrying around hatred for many of them. Has it affected them? Of course not. Has it affected me? You bet it has!
So, the message for me was clear for a long time but I could never internalise it until I started using the Calm App. Now that I am more present, these long standing grudges have assumed less importance. I have gone on with my own life and I have a wife and family I love. They will have gone on with their own lives, no doubt continuing to bully co workers because bullying is hard wired into them and bullies hardly ever apologise or change. There in that last sentence is the major part of my problem, a view of humans as basically bad with goodness being the exception.
So, I am a work in progress, but I know that only I can affect my mindset and I can only do that with hard work, psychologically speaking. I am putting in that work day by day and I am seeing some progress, but take it from me, grudges are a waste of time.
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
I have been lucky enough to travel around the world all my life. As I said in yesterday’s post, my parents worked abroad from the time I was 6 months old to the time I was 5 years old. On our way back to the UK, which was by ship, we spent two weeks in Australia. I remember those two weeks very clearly, more clearly than anything else on that amazing journey to the UK.
The memories are somewhat episodic, as you would expect given my age. However, I can remember that we docked at Perth and stayed in a hotel. The first thing that I remember is coming down to the TV room along with a number of other children to watch the cartoon version of The Fantastic Four! I have never seen it before or since, though I would love to, but I still remember my reaction to it very well. I was gripped by a completely different style of programme and I wasn’t alone when watching it, so there was a kind of shared excitement. Outside of the hotel I remember feeding the black swans in a park in Perth. I had never seen anything like them before and they were fascinating to me, as every swan I’d seen in the stories was white. Finally, I remember going to a beach in a place called Broome where the sand on the beaches was red. For years I had a seashell from that beach with the red sand clinging to it as a reminder, but that got lost in one of my moves.
This early experience ignited my passion for the country and gave me a lifelong yearning to return. I have returned three times so far and on one of those occasions I took a Masters Degree at the University of Wollongong. Like my Dad, I got offered a job there, and like my Dad I had to turn it down. I still have a feeling, however, that my time with Australia is not done.
What does your ideal home look like?
I have never really had much connection to bricks and mortar. Perhaps it was inevitable from very young. My parents lived in India, Pakistan and Singapore during my first five years. When they moved back to the UK we had four different addresses in the first four years we were back and by the time we settled down, relatively speaking, in the house I spent the rest of my childhood and teens in, a house was just a place to live.
Whenever I tried to think of my perfect house, and I suppose I must have done, it always had other children in it. I was an only child and I wanted a sister when I was younger because I always enjoyed the company of girls more than boys because they were happy to talk and they were nicer. However, I always preferred the company of the confident outgoing and adventurous girls because they were the qualities I felt that I lacked myself.
The outside of the house, and to some extent the inside never mattered, just the inhabitants. I am still bored by the house buying or renovating shows I see on television because as long as it is watertight and possible to heat during the winter, anything else is irrelevant to me. The concept that always baffles me in these shows is ‘kerb appeal’! Why on earth does it matter? You are inside the house so you don’t see it from outside most of the time. It’s not remotely important to me and no one has explained to me persuasively why it should be.
I admit that since we bought our current home outright – and notice I used the word home there – I have given more thought to the concept, but it is all about the family unit we have of myself, my wife and my daughter, and the visits from the other children. It is only a home because of the family. If I have a dream house now it would perhaps be in Australia, but that has been the case for 30 years! As usual, the bricks and mortar don’t matter so I don’t care what it looks like as long as it is sturdy.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 