Hope

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

that perches in the soul –

and sings the tune without the words- 

and never stops at all –

We are here. We got there. It’s Christmas.

Are you OK? Am I? Are we?

These days it is hard to tell, because so often it feels as if we are thinking with other people’s thoughts – even my questions rhyme with a meme I’ve seen somewhere online.

The twenty-four hours news cycle is now an every second news cycle.

Social media means we experience the thoughts and feelings of others more than we have ever done before.

It can be hard to know whether what we think and how we feel is how we think and feel, or whether our emotions are those of others reflected and amplified by us.

Undoubtedly it is not an easy time – in schools and beyond.

Behaviour seems worse.

There’s been in change in the way communities view education.

Recruitment and retention are in crisis. More and more children are struggling and there’s no clear answer on how to help them.

The dreadful death of Ruth Perry has the us all reeling and brought to the fore old and current hurt that feels existential.

When we turn from education the news elsewhere is even bleaker.

A declining economy, awful wars with no clear end, unseasonal warm weather reminding us we may be on the brink of further catastrophe.

Hope and happiness feel almost inappropriate – as if taking time to appreciate anything good is naïve – even irresponsible – a failure to come to terms with the gravity of everything.

But this is wrong – we need hope more than ever. We need happiness and Christmas is the time for it.

While – perhaps – the scale of our challenges might be unprecedented, Christmas is timed deliberately to fall close to the winter solstice when the nights are darkest and the light furthest away.

Since very ancient times humans have been vulnerable to despair at this time of year.

We are not the first.

As a history teacher I imagine a father living in an Anglo-Saxon village in brutal December worrying whether his children would survive the winter. I think of Great War soldiers huddled in their trenches with death all around them and why each year so many hoped for and end to the fighting before Christmas.

More than anything – whether you believe in the Christian message or not – I think Christmas is about hope against all odds.

This is why we need Christmas – at this time of year it is not wrong to turn into the light because without hope and a deliberate focus on things that are good, we won’t have the strength to do anything about the dark.

It is what Christmas is for.

And there is light – and this year I’ve been making a conscious effort to see and recognise it.

At the school I teach at there was a wonderful Christmas lunch.

Turkey with all the works, crackers, party hats and a pupil band playing songs they’d practised for months.

Children and teachers sat together talking and singing along. I wandered around the groups grinning, wishing there was a way I could explain to everyone how much this meant to me without freaking them out, wishing that they could know just how happy seeing safe, joyful children makes me.

The week before that a pupil in one of my classes really revised for a test for the first time and when they got their paper back did a tiny fist-pump and hissed “yes!”. And then later they asked if they could take the paper home to show their mum.

Just a day or so ago I made a minor change to a seating plan by telling two wonderful and sometimes chatty best friends that an Iron Curtain had descended between them, and we all laughed.

Just a minute ago I went through the canteen on the way to SLT briefing and saw an ECT miss a shot playing table tennis with one of her form, and they both burst out laughing while the children around them broke into ironic applause.

This year I’ve reminded myself to notice moments like this – to use them to remember that despite everything that’s hard I still love being where I am doing what I do. That as hard as things might be there are still wonderful things happening every day.  That I’ve never been more in love with teaching and schools, and that what I do still feels as important and valuable as it ever has. That I wouldn’t go back and change my choices even if I could.

Feeling like this is OK – hope isn’t just allowed but essential. To have the strength to pick up our burdens we must feel we can, and it is part of our responsibility to help children feel they can too.

And now it is the end of term and in the face of the state of the world there are things outside work to be happy about.

My daughters are happy and healthy and so excited.

My brother and sister-in-law arrive from Norway tomorrow. We’ll be together as a family with my mum and dad and I can’t wait.

I’m thankful I took my wife’s advice this year and put stuff in the calendar because I have pub dates with old teacher friends. We’ll probably drink more than we should, tell each other stories that we’ve told each other many times before and just enjoy existing together.  

I hope we’ll look forward too.

I think we will.

We’ve all had bad times – at work and elsewhere – and because we are good friends, we know all about these and helped each other in them. We came through and the strength we needed when stuff was really tough depended on us believing it was possible for things to get better and us reminding each other of this when it was hard to see.

Perhaps things will improve.

But even if they do not there is nothing wrong with choosing to feel hope and happiness, particularly when times are hard.

This is something Emily Dickinson understood well. In her poem “Hope” is the thing with feathers she writes about hope singing the tune without the words, and I think what she is getting at is the outrageous audacity of it – that even when we aren’t quite sure what we are hoping for, hope is still powerful.

And sometimes in the face of all the odds – when we are at our lowest ebb – the most astonishing things do happen.

I didn’t use to believe in miracles but now – for very personal reasons – I do.

Not every day, not common but common enough for it to be sensible to hope for them.

Merry Christmas everyone – see you in the new year.

“And so tell everyone that there’s hope in your heart
And tell everyone or it will tear you apart
At the end of Christmas day
When there is nothing left to say
The years go by so fast
Let’s hope the next beats the last.”

When the Thames Froze – Smith and Burrows