Shoulder

My working year actually starts today, more or less. It's that time of year when some people finally get down to work, which in my context means that people come looking for me to teach them how to get work done.

It's not that these people are idle, but that they are not fully competent. There is a lot of potential there, and it only needs a little tweaking to bring it out.

Recently, someone asked how you would encourage someone with more talent than yourself. I think you have to do it whole-heartedly. You can't stint on judicious (i.e. critically exact, but erring on the positive side) encouragement.

I've dealt with precocious and high-potential young people all my life. I can't offer them what I am as a goal, because that would be cheating them. I can only offer them what I am as a spur to higher achievement, much as a mountain shoulder can be used as a base camp for an assault on the summit.

I don't envy them, have never envied them. Their world is different from what mine was, and their heirs and successors will find it different again. In that light, there's no point having regrets about the past or casting a jaundiced eye over the future.

What I can bequeath to them however, are the lessons of age: patience, but not too much; cleverness, but not too much; faith, hope and love. Some come to these lessons early, some later. I always pray that the learning of such lessons comes sooner for most.

Morning Devotions — Secrets Revealed

Recently, two things happened which led to the writing of this particular post. The first thing was that one of my former students pointed out an ancient post on another blog which mentioned that I used to deliver morning meditations without reference to notes, thus leading the blogger to believe that I was either particularly religious or some sort of cyborg. The second thing was that about a month ago, I found an envelope containing those notes, and promptly threw them all away.

Here then is the secret history of my morning meditations.

To begin with, I've always found it difficult to do justice to any part of the Bible without recourse to a shelf of books. In preparing for a half-hour sermon, I normally refer to a stack of books that comes up to my waist. In preparing for morning devotionals, I need slightly less than that, but this is because a lot of it has stuck in my curious and slightly eccentric neural network. I never delivered a 'canned' devotion; every single one was an original. How did I do it? Here is an outline.

I spent time in prayer. The most important thing to me about speaking in public on questions of faith and practice is that the message is universal and slightly less than totally focussed. Why? Because if it were totally focussed, it would probably hit only one or two people, and morning devotions and such are meant to reach as many people as they can (and make their day better, hopefully). The problem with universality is that I'm not God. So I've always believed it is best to ask for help.

I would then write out the reading for the day, the thoughts that were related to it, and the logic that linked them all. I cut and erased till the 'script' fit a ten-minute maximum. And then I looked through once for mistakes. I always slept well. When I woke up, I would read through the notes (always written on a small piece of paper from a notepad or a 3 x 5 inch index card) once. I would read them again about ten minutes before delivery. And then, I delivered. And it was never quite the same as what I wrote out the night before.

This was the same routine I followed for chemistry lessons, TOK lessons, and any lesson except those for which I had no preparation for whatsoever. (Last year's batch of Year 4 students from a certain class will remember the unprepared one on graphic novels, Shakespeare, Homer and the three dimensions of literature. It wasn't that bad, right, guys?) The routine for the long lectures was of course different; I never had a written script since all the notes I needed were on-screen.

But the colleague who helped me cart the last material vestiges of my previous life away immediately understood why I was also throwing my devotional notes away. It wasn't to conceal the truth about the myth of my 'no notes' ability, or out of bitterness, or out of a desire to perpetuate the myth. It was because I realised (as I should have, earlier) that such notes are instants captured on paper. You can never deliver the same message twice. In fact, I never even once delivered the message as it was written out in my notes.

Which is probably why people never saw me referring to any notes during all my years of morning devotions. Well, that's the true story. And no, I am not an unusually pious human, nor a cyborg.