BEAUTIFUL IN EVERYTHING

So, now it's February and I think I should be posting here at least once a month and I think I should have things to say… not because I am a writer but because, as Descartes wrote, 'I think therefore I am'.

I almost wrote 'Degas' there instead of 'Descartes'; I had to stop and think, and search through the words in my head, like leafing through a dictionary, knowing 'Degas' was wrong and briefly having lost 'Descartes'. We all have those moments - sometimes called 'senior moments' when anyone older than forty-five has one. For me just now, I think it is something related to the busy my brain is and the crowded it is.

I was thinking about teaching the other day. It is what I do and it is the centenary this year of the school where I work and we have been asked to share any memories from days before this one. I recalled the silly you could be once and the time to laugh teachers had and I don't think it was because we were younger and had more energy. Now teachers can be so so busy, with every hour crammed with things to do, and staying after school to stretch the working day as far as it can be stretched.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy the job and do not resent the time that I have to put in for the wages I earn or for the service I deliver to children. It's just that I worry for the new teachers coming into the profession; I worry that they will more quickly burn themselves out or that they will more quickly become jaded and cynical and leave.

The other day I (and not just me) was asked if I could do a particular job in my free time. I laughed. The sense that when we are not standing in front of a class the time we have is free. I thought it absurd and not a little insulting. My brain is full and crowded with all the things that have to be done, so much so that I am dizzy sometimes, and I lose my thread when thinking and lose words and lose my way. But I am still lucid and still thinking and still growing and I still get letters of thanks from parents for the difference I made in their children's lives and in their learning.

I think therefore I am. By Descartes. And in my small and brief confusion at the start of this post I was taken to Degas; and in another sense 'Degas' was right. I remember standing in front of one of his pastels in New York, and I was transported and out of myself and wanting to be him or in the room with him - not for any other reason than to see the world as he saw it: beautiful in everything. Why 'thinking' and not 'feeling' or 'imagining' or 'being'? Why does Descartes lift 'thinking' above everything else that we are?

And in the end, Descartes does not escape God in his reduction of reality to the uncertain certainty of 'I think therefore I am'. And I think he must have known that.