Dear Parents and Caregivers,
“Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmann. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.” – An excerpt from a letter written by a Holocaust survivor to educators, published in Teacher and Child by Dr Haim Ginott, child psychologist and author.
Time and Growth
We all lead busy lives, school is no exception, when enrolling students, you see the child, 12 years passes quickly, and we see the young adult. During this time, we may miss our children’s growth due to the busyness of life. The many things we wished we had witnessed or been there to give advice can easily be missed. St Joseph’s motto – “Serve Him in Others”, has wisdom behind these words. Serve him in others is about time we spend for others, the time to grow, to reflect, to celebrate, and to deepen our own spiritual being in today’s world realising that it is not just about me but those around me.
Everything we produce, we produce to go faster than the ones before – it is a sign of progress; planes go faster than the speed of sound. Cars are sold for their capacity to go from zero to a 100km/ph in a couple of seconds. Information technology upgrades costing hundreds of dollars are down loaded every day to take milliseconds off the operating speeds of the version before them. To be valuable now, everything must go faster, start up more quickly and work at speeds measured in numbers no mind can calculate. We want instant everything (from food, electronic ticketing, accelerated education programs, and world news in 10 seconds.) We are people on the move – we want results. We are not people who believe in process anymore; as much as we love to talk about it. In our haste, our generation is at risk of losing the sense of the value of time. Speed has not saved us time. It has simply enabled us to fill it with twice as much work as we used to do. The faster we go the more we leave ourselves behind, including our own spiritual welfare. We do not stop for sunsets anymore. We take pictures instead, and then never take time to look at the pictures again.
There are some things that cannot be hurried, we cannot hurry the process of grief, growth or speed the effects of hurt or love. Time is not given for the sake of perfection but for the sake of discovery, our students spend 12 years discovering about themselves physically, academically, socially and spiritually, some even take longer. We need to remember the world was not made for our amusement but for our growth. Time is the gift of realisation, whatever is happening, whatever the stage in which we find ourselves, there is a moment for God. The more moments we have of slowness the more we have God in the now, which leads to us to taking seriously “Serving Him in Others”.
This week’s reflection:
“When All I do is fume about what isn’t. I lose a lot of life in which I could be rejoicing instead about all the good things that are.” (George Santayana)
