Turning 50

Wow.  Its finally happened.  I have turned 50.  I know that many of you may be surprised as, sadly, I look a lot more aged and withered than 50 already.  While the battering of my youth, and perhaps career on occasions, have left me a little greyer and fatter than I had hoped for at this time of life, I am only 50.

I remember my dad’s 50^th.  I was 25 at the time, just married, 10 feet high and bulletproof.  It feels like yesterday, yet here we are a quarter of a century down the track, I’m hitting the big one and my dad is turning 75.  What a special year it is for our family.

I remember as a young teacher around the same time, my then principal turning 50.  All of us on staff brought in funny gifts to tease him about his age and his wisdom, or folly, or both really.  He was a great leader and a good guy, but my overriding thought at the time was, wow, 50.  Man that is old.  He is so old and wise.

And now it’s me.  I feel neither old or particularly wise really.  And I wonder if there are young bucks on our team looking at me thinking what I thought back then, what feels like just a moment or two ago.

One of my mum’s favourite sayings is, ‘Time waits for no man, and very few women.’  She’s a fun lady and it is usually accompanied by one of her trademarks laughs.  But it’s true.  Time rolls on.  We are all victims of the inexorable reality of the chronograph. 

In one of his elvish poems Tolkien wrote, 

véni avánier ve lintë yuldar, si man i yulma nin enquantuva.

which translates to ‘The years like swift draughts pass away, now who will refill my cup?’  Aging is an eternal theme throughout the ages, it appears in literature and on film, in the oral traditions of most cultures.  And those themes raise their head in each of us as we hit another birthday with a zero in it.

Arrayed before this 50-year-old are the young and fabulous.  The student in our care and the families that we serve.  My generation, Gen X, are slowly leaving the education scene.  In the next 7 to 10 years our children will have moved through schools, our workforce will increasingly be less and less Gen X-ers and more and more Gen Y and Gen Z.  It’s a fact. 

What am I doing to prepare the students in my care for their tomorrow not my past?  What am I doing to prepare my college for relationships with Gen Y and Gen Z mums and dads, not the increasingly disappearing people of my generation?

We have to be in this space, we have to understand and implement best practice, we have to work differently as the world changes and the rate of that change increases.  We dare not rest on ‘we’ve always done that’ or else we risk becoming irrelevant very quickly.

Consider the fidget spinner.  By the time schools got around to working out if they were good or bad or if they should have a policy about them or not, they were gone.  We need to be agile, creative, flexible, adapatable and we need to create citizens who are the same.

Ah, so it goes.  The young and beautiful will inherit what’s next.  My 50 will become 60 and so forth etcetera until finally the curtain closes.  But I’m a child of the King, I’m a citizen of forever, so let the years come I say.

Buen Camino