MIND MOVES:We need to remember what we have learned in the past to engage with the present, writes TONY BATES.
‘PAY ATTENTION, you idiot!” the teacher roared, as he hurled a piece of white chalk straight for my head. Lucky for me, his bark was a lot fiercer than his aim. He missed. Not so lucky for Norman, my classmate who sat innocently to my left.
Norman hung on this teacher’s every word. Yet he had ended up taking the brunt of these assaults on my mental absences more times than either of us cared to acknowledge.
He had a bad stammer. Chalk missiles bouncing off his head aggravated that stammer. When he tried to protest his innocence, he virtually choked on his words.
Teachers adopted one of two strategies with him: they either said, “Oh sit down!” before he had managed to get through even a word, or, almost as embarrassing, they insisted he finish what he had started to say no matter how long it took.
I met him some years ago at a class reunion and there was no trace of a stammer in his speech. I remarked on this and asked him how he’d beaten it. “The love of a woman,” he responded. The universal balm for so many human afflictions had clearly worked its magic for him. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, I thought.
Why I had been time warped back into this particular moment of my past was something of a mystery. There I was minding my own business in 2009 when, wham! – I’m back in secondary school sitting in a two-seater bench, with its fold-up seat.
I could almost run my finger along the smooth curved crater carved out for my pencil; I could smell the aged oak and taste the fear in my mouth that confrontations with angry teachers inevitably produced.
The mind can move with extraordinary agility. Your brain is a Tardis inside your head. Small and compact from the outside, but when you enter it, you step into a universe of infinite possibility. Suddenly you command an immense time-scape of past, present and future. Choose any destination that you can remember or imagine, and you’re off!
On this occasion, however, I felt like Doctor Who in one of those episodes where he landed into some event in history that was not of his choosing. I could relate to that perplexed look that he wore as he became conscious of a vaguely familiar scene and wondered why on earth he had been pulled back to that particular place.
Why Norman, why now? I can’t be certain, but I believe it has something to do with a core operating principle of our minds: we need to remember what we have learned in the past in order to engage with the present. Every experience has taught us something. Nothing is wasted. Each one holds a piece of the truth we seek about ourselves and about life. These truths can be our way back into existence, especially when we are lost.
The question for me was, what had I learned in that classroom that I had need of today?
Norman had taught me to see beyond disability and never to underestimate the power of love to heal what is broken in our lives. My teacher had shown me that conflict is an important part of human interaction; that it can serve to wake us up and keep us on our toes.
Paradoxically, he also taught me that in confronting another we should allow them their voice and not subdue them through shame and humiliation.
Perhaps the main reason I returned to that classroom was my need to be reminded to pay attention. It has always been a failing of mine. Had I been schooled in recent times, I would no doubt have been given a medical alibi for this shortcoming and had medication rather than chalk hurled in my direction.
Because in the here and now of 2009 I’m actually sitting beside a forest lake in western Kentucky, with the sun on my face, the light dancing on the water. As I listen, I hear the rustle of some wild thing in the trees behind me and the splash of an unseen frog as it breaks the water’s surface.
Like the Zen poet who wrote, “Even in Kyoto, I was missing Kyoto”, the great danger for me is that the beauty of this moment could pass me by. I needed to hear that teacher’s voice once more, so that I could come back to where I am and not allow myself to be lost in space.
In my defence, it has only been a matter of hours since I returned, once again, to this amazing forest wilderness.
By the time I file my next column, I will have settled into this place and have some fresh insights to share.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)