I seem to flip flop between being courageous and not. I am usually more courageous when I have returned from England, as I have recently. Perhaps I feel more valid when I’m there?
I can usually be very courageous for anyone in my family or close friends of any age. My ideas flow well and I can help and support them in very innovative ways.
Courage came to me for the second time (the first time was when I blindly emigrated to the U.S. — but perhaps that wasn’t courage!!) when we started to home educate our oldest son. At the time I didn’t perceive it as being courageous because his one year public school experience was so very bad for him and us that there was no alternative choice.
I thought we could return to how things had been for the first 6 years of his life and in many ways we did. But I now realise that there was lots of pressure on me and thus on him to be the best we could be. We were innovators in the home education world, bucking the system. I made sure we dotted the “i’s†and crossed the “t’s†so that no one could ever say we didn’t behave in a socially appropriate fashion and didn’t seem to be ‘learning’.
By doing that in the public realm we were free to pursue our ideas of what it means to be educated.
Now that he is an author, and designer of some note and well regarded in his professional world I am beginning to vicariously (good enough for me!) reap the rewards of being courageous 24 years ago.
Then came son number two. As luck would have it he could think very clearly from a very tender age and we were lucky to recognise that in him. Thus the 8 mornings of pre‑K I paid for (fees were paid monthly) were a test run to see if he would like to go to school. Having learned to tie his shoe laces and having had quite an enjoyable time I asked him at the end of the month if he would like to continue “No thank you†he said. And thus the decision was made. We would educate both sons at home.
What a miracle that has turned out to be. They have both matured in such diverse ways just as their lives contain diverse interests and passions; they are accomplished in many aspects of their lives; their strengths are so complimentary to each other; they are seldom afraid of adversity (and have been required to tackle phenomenal challenges, beyond anything we could have imagined for them); there is nothing they cannot accomplish especially if someone tells them “it can’t be done†— in their minds “the solution hasn’t been thought of and it’s my turn to find the it†and solutions are found.
I recently took an interesting writing class called “Writing on the Edgeâ€. Many of the participants were fiction writers and have already been published or at least have agents.
I came away from that class knowing that I had to be more courageous with my writing, to continue this blogging project, and I also came to understand something else, which had come up in recent reading. A question in the class was whether you are a ‘plunger’ or an ‘organised’ writer. Do you just dive in and start writing or do you write an outline first and stick with it?
I am a plunger I discovered. It reminded me that there are linear thinkers and lateral thinkers. I am a lateral thinker and thus often defy convention. I was a lateral thinker in choosing to home educate and my sons are also problem solving lateral thinkers.
In the regimens of today’s world we are anomalies; that makes life hard for us but exciting and very interesting at the same time. Life is never dull.
A linear thinker is planning for and envisioning his retirement his whole working life, a lateral thinker lives life to the fullest as it comes.
I am thankful to my father for having the courage to live life to the fullest and teaching his children to do so. Just as well – he died suddenly when he was only 68 but was sailing his beloved boat on his beloved river just a week before that.
Such courage I carry with me every day. My turn.