Clarity for Teachers: Day 19
‘When you die, you will have to leave everything behind. Don’t try to hold on to anything.’
When I was eleven, I went away to boarding school, against my parents’ wishes. It seems extraordinary now, but at the time I just knew that I needed to escape. We’d moved to the town where we were living three years earlier, I’d gone into the second year at the local junior school which meant I fell in with the kids who hadn’t already settled into friendship groups the year before. My friends were the troubled ones, the ones who get labelled as troublemakers, and so I got labelled that way myself. And for three years, I was singled out by a headteacher who brought his fundamentalist version of religion to school — in my final year, he preached a whole assembly on the ‘sinfulness’ of a boy he wouldn’t name, but who I knew was me, on account of my having been sent to lunchtime detention three times in a week. (Years later, I learned that my dad had sent him a mocked-up newspaper article — ‘Local minister withdraws son from religious education’ — and, on this one occasion, the man had made an apology.)
It wasn’t my friends I wanted to escape from, it was the mentality — the town where everyone said this was the best school to go to, the fear that when we went up to secondary school it would all be more of the same. My parents went to visit a local independent school, but the headmaster advised that they couldn’t afford to send me there, even with a scholarship. The one option they could think of was a school seventy miles away with a historic connection to the church in which my dad was a minister. So we went to visit, and afterwards my parents explained that they had talked about it and didn’t think it would be right — but I was so fiercely insistent that I talked them into sending me there anyway.
Two years later, I decided it was time to come back. It had been a good school, there were some great teachers, I’d spent much of my time in the library — but I’d reached the point where I was ready to come home. As this decision built up inside me, it felt full of drama, like so much was at stake, like everyone would have opinions about it and they would all weigh on me: I was killing off a whole path that my life had been on. And then I took the decision, and it happened, and mostly it felt uneventful. Life closed so quietly around this change of course, it felt like a joke.
I was thirteen. In plenty of times and places, that would be an age of initiation, a threshold to the first stage of adult life within your community. A common feature of such initiations is a ritual encounter with the reality of your own death. In his book Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Somé describes returning at the age of nineteen to the Dagara village from which he had been kidnapped by missionaries as a small child. He had been educated in a church school, trained to be a priest, but fled after a fight with a teacher in his final year. Back in the village, the elders discuss what to do with this young man who has been educated in the white man’s ways and has long since passed the age at which he should have been initiated. Finally, they agree that he could become a necessary bridge between worlds, and so he is allowed to complete the initiation with that year’s group. Sixty teenage boys go out with the elders into the wilderness; six weeks later, fifty-six of them return alive.
We don’t have much in the way of initiations in the culture I grew up in, unless you count the reckless encounters with mortality that teenagers bring about for each other with cars or drink or drugs or dares. The closest we have to an officially sanctioned marker of the threshold is your final set of school exams. Imagine if for every class of thirty going into the exam hall to sit those A-level papers, only twenty-eight of them returned.
I lost contact with the friends I’d made during those two years at boarding school. Most of them lived locally to the school; it was far from the social world of the English public school and far from the self-enclosed community those words might conjure up. But years later, at university, my sister crossed paths with one of my best friends from that time, and since then we have seen each other every few years. I remember visiting him when we were in our mid-thirties. By then, he was an Anglican priest serving a parish not far from the school where we had met. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘out of our class at school, I’ve seen two of them buried in the past couple of years.’ Both had died from alcohol-related diseases.
When you die, you will have to leave everything behind. The world will close so quietly around you, it almost seems a joke.
We don’t offer our young people much in the way of a frame to encounter their mortality, to absorb the truth of death as the condition of life. No modern society could sanction an initiatory process in which the stakes were as high as the one which Malidoma describes. Yet without some held encounter, some process of incorporating death into life, I can’t help feeling that we are sent ill-equipped into the world of adulthood, and that this lack of equipment takes its toll.
Västerås, 25 March, 2020
This is the nineteenth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
