In the end we are each as alone as each other.
Sitting in a school hall watching a small girl sing a song.
And the other bigger but still small girls and boys.
In the company of a group of parents.
Noticing what’s different in the girl, compared to when she is at home.
Knowing she is having to develop her ways of being in the world outside of the circle of her parents and immediate family.
Feeling the tragedy of that.
And knowing that it isn’t just the tragedy of that that I’m feeling - in fact, it may mostly not be the tragedy of that.
It may in fact be the tragedy of a little boy, 30 years or so ago, having to develop his ways of being in the world outside the circle of his parents and immediate family.
Having to come to terms with the unsafety; having to interpret the laughter of the classmates and parents; having to come to terms with his parents’ responses to ‘I don’t want to go’.
But how much of that was about that?
Maybe, instead, it was another little boy, decades earlier, coming to terms with his dad never coming home. Having to develop his ways of being in the world with no circle of parents left any more - just his mother and brother and uncles and aunts.
Or a little girl, around the same time, going off to a boarding school.
Or even further back than that.
All the way to the dawn of time.
And on, into the future, perhaps.
As the small girl, in a few decades, sits in a school hall noticing her son or daughter adapting to this strangeness outside the circle of parents or immediate family. Or is it that? Is it in fact her body holding the tension of this day, in 2024, or another one like it, many years earlier?
Two spirals of history, back and forwards through the decades, centuries, millennia. Meeting in this moment.
All these children, dealing with separation and the perceived unsafety of the moment.
Or, maybe, hopefully, many of them aren’t.
And I’m simply seeing the world as I am, not as it is.
Remembering carried pain and struggle.
Carrying the burned, branded symbol of those days somewhere on the heart.
Maybe always.
Maybe, somehow, this time can be different: maybe, gradually, we can heal this wound of separation.
Or maybe it is part of all our lives: the realisation, in the end, that our parents won’t always be with us.
Or that they weren’t really creating safety anyway.
In the end we are each as alone as each other.
Either alone - or, of course, perhaps equally not alone.
Perhaps equally not separate.
Perhaps, under it all, not burned and branded at all.
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PS Read my latest long-read article in the Leading With Honour series, here: The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth (Leading With Honour II)
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. (I cheated a little on this one - took about 15)
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.