For A New Beginning

Though your destination is not clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm.

John O’Donohue, ‘For a New Beginning’

And thus, as a College we begin again – 2021 awaits us with its empty canvas, and its multi-coloured palette beckoning the first paint stroke. Usually, I enjoy a good beginning – be that a book, a film, the first sip of a morning coffee or … a new school year. There is nothing like the energy that circulates at a first-term start, nothing. Personally, I tend to cultivate my own feelings of excitement by over-planning and over-organising for what lies ahead, lest anxiety take its uninvited foothold. While I enjoy imagining the year ahead, I admit to a bubbling nervousness too – one that sweeps through my thinking and often begins unhelpfully with the words – What if? A persistent question this year being: What if 2021 follows the COVID pattern of 2020? We often erroneously interpret the new year’s energy as being singularly excitement and passion for the possibilities ahead. For many it is. Yet, we also know that for others, the anxiety of beginning often feels overwhelming. Stress. Expectation. Disappointment. Separation. There are other feelings that lurk in the heady promise of a new beginning – they too are important to acknowledge and manage and reframe.

If you were to draw a continuum with excitement at one end and fear counterpoised at the other, you would capture the feelings inherent in substantial beginnings. We all sit on that metaphoric continuum whenever we approach significant starts – the names of the feelings can vary, but the underpinning adrenalin rush exists for us all.

As commencement becomes imminent, we may find ourselves moving from one end of the continuum to the other, rapidly.

The Junior School girl who donned her uniform two weeks before the first day of school and wore a tartan ribbon every day throughout the holidays may refuse to budge from the back seat of the car on day one. The Boarder who has professed her readiness to begin at Fairholme, for years, and who packed her bags meticulously in December, is devastated when her parents leave. Suddenly the excitement evaporates, and fear takes its place. Conversely, the child you anticipate will not manage a beginning with ease, does. Yes, we all do beginnings differently, and differently in different situations, too.

As parents, we too can be confronted by our own sense of loss when our holiday rhythm or life rhythm is abruptly recalibrated through the intervention of school. Those same feelings of stress, expectation, disappointment and separation can emerge within us. On my son’s first day at school, I was busying myself by putting his books in his tidy tray when I felt an uninvited and unexpected wash of sadness – the rude awareness that this was my youngest child’s beginning and thus the conclusion of a phase of parenting I had enjoyed. Reality bit hard with the sharpest of teeth. Fortunately, my own stab of sadness didn’t seem to affect him at all. Whilst I tried to maintain a semblance of control by placing his school life in order, he turned to me and said, ‘You can go now, if you like. I’m ready.’ Five-year-old Mitchell was better prepared for a new beginning than his mother was.

On Thursday, at our Commencement Assembly, Tatum Stewart (Senior, 2019) spoke about beginnings. Insightfully, Tatum observed that ‘beginnings more often than not bestow immense anxiety, uncertainty, and even restlessness.’ As an accomplished National Hockey player, Tatum understands the value of preparation; and she also knows the surge of adrenalin that inevitably hovers before a big game, and that it can be called exhilaration or named as anxiety: our choice. In sporting contexts, too, the sliding continuum of fear versus excitement also exists, and how we brand our adrenalin rushes, matters. The branding and the words we use all colour the canvas and dictate the outcome. In a lovely reflection on her first game of Hockey – as a three year old – Tatum described her father dragging her by the hand, onto the field. He promised her that if she hated it, she didn’t have to play, again. But she took the field and, to be cliched, she hasn’t looked back.

Yes, every time we begin again, whatever the circumstance, we simply have to take the field. Spectating, standing tremulously on the sideline or refusing to participate limit our opportunities and truncate our potential. Anxious or excited – we simply have to step up and take to the field. We have to. In the words of poet, John O’Donohue, we have to promise the beginning, hold nothing back, and learn to take ease in risk, because when we do so, we will find ourselves at ho[l]me in a new rhythm, a rhythm that unfurls its unexplored possibilities.

At Fairholme, let us all take to the field with determination in 2021.

Dr Linda Evans | Principal