a ladder reaching into the sky
Family Thinking

Light in the Dark

I’ve been back a few days now after the World Education Summit in Chiang Mai. It feels like a bright shining light has been turned off in a dark room. The glow is still there, but it will fade to nothing after a while. What do I do now?

I suppose that we can look at this as an opportunity. It is a point at which I can out of the room and enter another space. The world is full of inspirational ideas. And those ideas are right here, at home.

But Aren’t There Many Ways To Do Good Things?

Chay had just sat down from a talk called Finding What You Love To Do &  Do It. He described a way of blending new forms of art to tell stories through painting with henna.

Indeed there are more ways than ever to find inspiration in your every day. Look at TED, a movement dedicated to inspiring the change we seek. Inspiration that seeks to reinvent, refocus and reinvigorate.

And there are some things that are not household names. Take High Resolves for example, an organisation doing fabulous work within the system. I went to their conference at the University of Technology Sydney in August 2018. Fantastic! At last, a view of citizenship and ownership for children to engage them in some of the big and unanswered questions. Groundbreaking to think of education beyond the normality and standardisation of the curriculum.

I think high resolves for inspired my resolution to find something better.

But my view changed while there. Because I realise that  High Resolves is noble and represented by some very accomplished people, it teaches its ideas in a box, while the intrinsic value of what it represents is actually what World Education is about. 

Don’t Contain Yourself

As i reflect on what this means, I realised that inspiration is the first part of the journey. I don’t like putting great ideas in a box. Indeed, those ideas are cause and reason to celebrate and develop things, but there is a point in life where one realises that a good idea, an inspiration should underpin everything one does. It should guide every fabric of one’s being, determine one’s destiny and be an intricate and noble part of whatever we do. One good idea often inspires another. So we take them both and weave them into our being. Then another idea, and another, and so on. Over time, those intricate and delicate threads interweave to form a beautiful tapestry. More than the fragility of a single good idea, but rather composed of a set of individually frail but congruent notions that together create something more powerful than any unique idea could manifest alone.

That tapestry is what we gaze upon. It does not deserve to be in a box, nor even a frame. We should walk on it, lie down on it, wrap ourselves in it, take it with us.

Good is not a force to be contained, and is instead a thing to be unleashed and set free. And that is what we are grappling with. How do we take the inspirations around us and bring them to life?