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Nova 1035
This week I thought about time a lot, well I always spend a lot of time thinking about time – how we never seem to have enough of it, how we don’t necessarily always use it in the best ways we could, and how, even though we do also need to have some down-time we (or at least I hope it is we and not just me) find ourselves judging ourselves if we do not fill every possible hour with some productive way to spend our time.
I’m sitting writing this late on Friday evening again (two for two) because I didn’t have the time to write it earlier – I had my show this morning, then we all went to the cricket (which was fun, but still meant I couldn’t do other things with that time), and then this afternoon I had a Birthday party at the wall. I haven’t done the weekly shopping yet and I have another Birthday party tomorrow morning and a group of kids coming to climb on Sunday morning. I also haven’t exercised properly in a couple of days, which I thought I could do after the kids finish climbing on Sunday, but I’d actually like to take my son to watch the South Africa vs. Australia U19 World Cup game. It’s not that I’m complaining, all the things I’m doing I enjoy doing, it’s more a case of (to paraphrase a quote I saw somewhere) “you can do anything you want to do, you just can’t do everything you want to do”.
I also spent quite a bit of time thinking about bullying, power, and the abuse thereof. Rather than being based on reports from schools this time though, it was instead due to global geo-political tensions and machinations. We’ve seen the United States kidnap the president of Venezuela, issue (unsuccessful) threats to the Iranian government to step down, and threaten allies with all sorts of levies and other punitive measures if they don’t give him what he wants when it comes to Greenland – all classic bully moves. We’ve also though seen what can happen when a bully gets stood up to…
While it doesn’t tie directly into the idea of how there is strength in communal action and how a group of people choosing to stand together can wield great power (sadly the only anecdote I could think of that would address that idea directly was to talk about the movie “The Ant Bully” – and nobody needs me to do that), the entire situation does remind me of an experience I had many years back:
When I was at boarding school there was a boy who was the biggest bully, he was horrible to everyone except his group of toadies who followed him around, reveling in his cruelty and basking in the protection being one of his ‘chosen few’ afforded them. He was the boy everyone watched with fear, but one day I saw a look of fear in him that made me realize that there was a reason he was the way he was. We were sitting in class and one of the matrics came to call him because his father was at the school to visit him. The minute he heard those words he went pale and appeared to shrink, he was no longer the big scary bully that everyone tiptoed around, he was just a scared little boy.
I’d love to say that he was no longer a threat after that day, or that, having seen the fear in him I had the guts to stand up to him the next time he took his inner demons out on me but this is real life rather than a movie – he carried on being a bully and he carried on tormenting anyone he could, but I understood that he was compensating for something and there was a reason he was the way he was (sadly that knowledge didn’t make the bullying hurt any less).
Take from that what you will I suppose – not all the thoughts I think are fully formed, in fact most of the time they’re swirling around, changing shape, texture, and opacity, being added to and taken away from, and often driving me mad because I can’t resolve them.
But, fully formed or not, those are just some of the many things I’ve thought about this week.
