September 2016 – Page 2 – Musings from the cold

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Posted on September 20, 2016 by Sharon

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My sister Debbie has an impulse to pull people away from the edge if she thinks they’re too close. I have an impulse to shut garden gates when I see them swinging open. Different impulses, but ones we manage to control.

There’s one impulse that we both share, however, that is much harder to control. In fact, we are rarely successful at controlling it.

It is an impulse for fairness and justice. We are aggrieved when we experience, and when we see, unfairness and injustice, when things aren’t right.

When we were younger, and complaining about something that wasn’t fair and wasn’t right, our mother would say and neither is a black fella’s left leg*.

Mum was clearly saying that nothing could be done about the situation that sparked our feeling of injustice: let it be because that’s just the way life is. There was an inevitability, a finality about this aphorism that niggled away at me.

Why do I have to clean the bathroom again when Debbie’s never cleaned the bathroom, my 12 year-old self would wail. It’s not fair!

My mother would chant her now familiar refrain about left black legs. I got that being left, those legs weren’t right, and being black they weren’t fair, but my ‘rights’ and ‘fairs’ were of a completely different nature that I deeply felt weren’t being taken seriously.

I would slump off to the bathroom to scrub it clean, bemoaning (loudly and vociferously) the injustice of this situation. Things didn’t have to be the way they were. We could change things. Surely we could … or else …

I could never finish the ‘or else’, never get to why it was important to challenge the way things were. They didn’t have to be the way they were, I knew that intuitively, instinctively, but I was not able to articulate more than that. It just felt wrong that things had to stay the same, particularly when those things didn’t feel (or weren’t) right. It didn’t feel right that life was a series of inevitable situations that I had to simply accept for what/how they were.

Situations like the men at the local railway station drinking out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. It wasn’t right that men should live like that; surely something could be done? It wasn’t right that the children I met when doing work experience in Year 10 had been taken away from their families and forced to live in a community headed by an angry white man. It wasn’t right that someone cut the tail off a Labrador and then abandoned the injured dog by the side of the road. It wasn’t right that I be sent to the principal in Year 12, as a 21-year-old student, for failing to attend the sports carnival and for encouraging others’ non-attendance. (I explained to the principal that I had run a study group instead of the 400 metres, and he agreed, with only a small dose of exasperation, that it was a much better use of my time and, looking me over, my capabilities.)

Fast forward many (many) years and a senior colleague advising me: Sharon, if there’s a choice between peace and justice, always go for peace.

But … but … 12-year-old me and 15-year-old me and 21-year-old-me came rushing back.

But … choosing peace meant accepting things the way they were, and that didn’t feel right to me, not when those things were not right and not fair. Why do others get to make decisions about things that don’t impact them, but impact others (others I care about), and I don’t get to have a say in that decision? When the course my team of colleagues and I had spent two years developing was suddenly scrapped I fought against the injustice and unfairness of it. It had implications for students, implications for staff, it meant accepting something less, something inferior.

Go for peace.

But I couldn’t. I was angry. I felt disempowered. It was as if those making the decisions didn’t value my work or the work of my colleagues, at least not enough to allow it to continue; they didn’t value the ways we’d developed relationships with our students and the meaning and significance of those relationships to the lives of those students. They threw out our work as if it didn’t matter … but it did matter.

Go for peace.

I visited Debbie on the weekend and even though the decision that will change her professional life was made some time ago, she’s still angry. She feels disempowered. The decisions that others made about her work and the work of her colleagues has not been valued, at least not enough to allow it to continue; the relationships with her students and the meaning and significance of those relationships to the lives of those students have likewise not been valued. They threw out her work as if it doesn’t matter … but it does matter.

Deb works in a correctional centre – a gaol (jail if you’re in the US). In May this year, the NSW state government decided that inmates don’t need qualified teachers to teach them, and so Deb, a senior educational officer, and her team of teachers will all be out of work by the end of the year.

Debbie is angry. She still feels the sting of this decision months after it was made. She is fighting for justice and cannot settle for peace. She could walk away, not get involved, accept the inevitability of the situation, the finality of the decision, but she’s fighting for others. She’s fighting for inmates who require expertise and experience from their teachers.

Misty Adoniou, writing in The Conversation recently, concludes by arguing that “we claim that professional, qualified and quality teachers are crucial to improving learning outcomes, and the economic health of the nation. But we pursue policies that don’t put these teachers in front of our most marginalised students”. Misty is talking about students learning English as an additional language, and those with disabilities. But she could just as easily be talking about inmates in the country’s gaols.

Debbie feels the injustice of the decision to remove qualified teachers from NSW gaols deeply – it goes against what she knows is right and just. And she rails against it, wanting it to be different, knowing that it could be different. She doesn’t want to settle for the way things are … but it’s more than that. It’s a deep-seated impulse, a value deeply held, that when things aren’t right we shouldn’t stand back and let them happen. We should fight for others and for what we believe. It’s part of the fabric of her being; it’s who she is.

Choose peace.

Peace or justice.

Does peace sound too much like giving in? Giving up? Not fighting for what is right and fair? Is that why I’m uncomfortable with that choice?

Is it because it’s presented as a choice, as a dichotomy? A polarised/polarising choice? Does it have to one or the other? Could we have both? Is that even a possibility?

There are bigger conversations to be had of course, more questions for me to confront– questions like right and fair for whom, and is wanting what is ‘right’ the same as ‘being right’, and does peace mean allowing the status quo to go unchallenged – but this is not the place for that conversation, for those questions.

I just know that when we are confronted with a situation that feels unjust and unfair our impulse will always lean towards justice.

That being said, Deb, I do hope that you will eventually find peace.

*This wouldn’t be said these days because someone stood up for what is right and what is fair.

Photography, Travel

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Posted on September 19, 2016 by Sharon

Yesterday there was a detour to see the water pouring over the wall at the Hume Dam.

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Learning, Life

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Posted on September 18, 2016 by Sharon

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I pack the car, pick Tim up from the train station and we head up to my sister’s for the weekend. Along the way a bird, pecking at something on the road, continues to peck as if oblivious to its almost certain death. I remain poised as we drive ever closer, knowing with calm assurance that it will fly out of the way.

We arrive in time for morning tea. This is a regular ritual: every Saturday morning Debbie and her husband get together with a group of friends for a cuppa and a chat at a local cafe.

Tim and I are well known to this group of my sister’s friends. We have spent a number of Saturday mornings drinking tea and chatting, as if we too were their friends.

I have done this my whole life: latched on to my sister’s friends rather than making my own. I find it easier that way – Deb does all the work of making and keeping friends and every now and then I pop along and have conversations with them as if they are my friends as well.

Many years ago, when we were in primary school Stacey, one of Debbie’s friends, invited her on an outing to the beach. Somehow I wrangled an invitation too. Even then, I didn’t have friends of my own, preferring to hang out with my sister and her friends. [I don’t think Deb was as in favour of this arrangement as I was.]

As Stacey’s Dad drove us all to the beach, we sat in the back chatting, and laughing at nothing in particular as eight and nine year olds do. I nearly jumped out of my skin though when Stacey suddenly screamed, Dad, slow down. Please, Dad, don’t hit it!

Was there a person on the road, I wondered? A baby perhaps? Maybe a kid had fallen off his bike and was stumbling bleeding down the centre of the road. It must have been something momentous for Stacey to react like that, I thought.

It was a bird.

But Stacey’s Dad slowed down, the bird flew away unscathed, and we continued calmly to the beach.

To say that I was impressed with this interaction between father and daughter would be a mammoth understatement. Stacey had been able to influence her father’s behaviour in, if not exactly an hysterical way, a decidedly dramatic fashion! Stacey’s father, the man who had built the house we lived in, a big burly man who bossed others around for a living, took notice of what his nine-year-old daughter had said.

I sat with this racing and rolling around in my mind for the rest of the drive to the beach. Once we arrived it flew straight out of my mind of course because there were sandcastles to build and shells to collect to make a number eight with (eight was my favourite number that year).

But the episode lingered in my mind, swirling beneath the delight of being at the beach with people who weren’t my family.

The following weekend, I was again on my way to the beach, this time with my own family. A bird was on the road up ahead. I hesitated, then decided to go for it.

Dad, I screamed, slow down. Please don’t hit it!

Dad didn’t slow down.

It’ll move, he said, in that quiet, dry way he has. And it did.

I learnt a lesson that day. I still ponder about what that lesson was even after all these years of working it over in my mind. I think I learnt a number of lessons actually: lessons about emotional responses, pragmatic thinking, the capacity to influence behaviour (or not), and other things I still can’t articulate.

But it meant that when I saw the bird on the road yesterday morning I just knew that there was no need for histrionics.

We drew ever closer, and I heard my Dad again: it’ll move, and at the very last moment the bird flew lazily away.

Thanks Dad … I think.

Learning, Life

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Posted on September 17, 2016 by Sharon

This is Debbie, my big sister. She doesn’t look much like an axe murderer (mostly because she isn’t) but she did come close a number of years ago.

When I say ‘a number of years’ I’m talking about the late 1960s, so really, quite a long time ago now, when neither of us had yet reached the age of ten.

Our parents had bought a block of land on which to build a house. Dad decided that it would be quite fun to clear the block himself and so after work (for him, school for us) and on the weekends we’d head up to the block and he’d dig up trees and rocks and such like.

As Dad wielded an axe, Debbie, in a moment of father-emulation, took up the tomahawk.

Sharon, said she, hold that rock while I chop it. She knew how this worked. She’d been watching Dad.

Now, I mentioned that Deb is my big sister and as all little sisters know, if your big sister is emulating your father, is wielding a tomahawk, and suggests you hold a rock, you do as you’re told.

So I held the rock.

The blade was lifted, it hung momentarily in the air at the height of its swing, then came down to rend the rock in two.

Well, that was the plan. At the last minute, the rock, which was round, rolled to the right and so instead of the blade of the tomahawk rending the rock in two, it instead sliced through my finger. The pointer finger on my left hand to be precise.

Blood (mine). Screams (mine and Deb’s). Shouts (Dad’s). Swooning (me). Ditching the tomahawk and finding a place to hide (Deb). Swearing (Dad). One daughter getting into trouble.

Now at this point I can imagine that you’d be thinking it would be the tomahawk-wielding big sister who would be getting into trouble as Dad drove (swiftly) to the ambulance station.

And it would be at that point you would be wrong.

Even though the blood dripping off the tomahawk was mine, even though the finger hanging in two pieces was mine, even though the pain in said two-pieced finger was mine, even though the horror of having my tomahawk-wielding sister sitting next to me in the car was mine … it was me getting into trouble.

It seems that I ‘shouldn’t have been so stupid’ and that I ‘should have known better’.

Lesson learned … the hard way.

[I still bear the scar]

[On my hand as well as in my heart]

Learning, Life

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Posted on September 16, 2016 by Sharon

My sister wrote through the week about her impulse to pull people away from the edge if she thought they were getting too close.

I too have an impulse, but of a different kind.

I live in an area that is awash with picket fences. Each of those picket fences has a gate.

Now, I happen to know that gates are supposed to be shut, so you can imagine my reaction when I see a gate that’s been left open.

I can feel my arm being pulled out of my jacket pocket, my hand reaching over, my fingers touching the top of the gate; a quick flick, and it’s shut.

I never do it of course, but the impulse is strong.

Each time I control that impulse the middle finger of my left hand aches, deep within it.

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I am transported back to when I was six years old (maybe five). We were dropped off at Mrs Miller’s house every morning before school, and while my memory is hazy, I have a few, very clear recollections.

One involves the gate. I would stand at the gate watching the big kids go past on their way to school. I wouldn’t just stand on the gate though; I’d swing on it. I have a funny feeling that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I’d watch the big kids and wonder what it’d be like to be so grown up that you could walk to school independent of your mum or Mrs Miller. I used to wonder about something else too, in the way little kids do when they’re trying to make sense of their world.

You see, we lived in Miller St at the time, and my sister, brother and I were looked after by Mrs Miller. It went round and round in my head like the boiled lollies my Nan used to keep in a tin in the car would roll around my mouth, sucking all the meaning out of it. What a delightful bit of synchronicity for a young girl to dwell on. How about that, I’d say to the big kids (in my head of course), I live in Miller St and Mrs Miller looks after me before and after school. Don’t you think that’s interesting, I’d ask them (in my head, of course).

One day, swinging surreptitiously on the gate, making sense of my world, something really quite dreadful happened. Somehow my hand slipped into the workings of the gate and my finger was crushed. Had a big kid walked past and pulled the gate shut, not fighting his impulse as all big people should? Or was it my own fault, for swinging when I shouldn’t have been?

I will never know, but what I do know is that I ended up at the doctor’s.

[Note: It’s hard to type with my fingers and toes clenched against the horror of what happened there.]

My fingernail was damaged to such an extent that the doctor ripped it off.

Just like that.

A quick pull, and off it came.

Screams burst forth from me.

I don’t know if I screamed then, but I’m screaming now. Oh, the very thought of it is horrendous.

And so, while I resist the impulse to pull gates shut these days, I do so with a heavy heart: a shut gate causes no damage to five-year-old fingers.

I learnt that the hard way!