10 Years Later

So, 

I was walking through the college grounds today when a kid called out from a distance, 'Mr Altmann, you need to update your Blog, you haven't written anything since 2019!'

How profound!

I have long neglected this space and not even thought about posting anything for such a while, the fact that someone has looked at it recently was amazing.  The primary purpose of my blog was to record the adventure which our little family undertook along the Camino de Santiago ten years ago.

Yep, ten years.

The memories keep popping up on my socials, images of my little kids, me with black hair not grey, the beautiful Spanish countryside, a different time and a different life.

What we now call pre-COVID.

Looking back through my blog, that distant past, I get a bitter-sweet reminder of that special time.  What a joy, what profound pleasure there is in living life at walking pace.  What unquantifiable satisfaction there was in such as simple tasks as walking, eating wholesome food, sleeping, growing each other as people, participating in something so present and yet so ancient.

There is a quiet voice that calls me back, even now.  Reaching out from my own past, from the echoes of the myriad of pilgrims who have gone before, and since, flooding me with that gentle release, washing over me with that assurance that there is a simpler way.

And like Banjo Paterson lamenting that out there somewhere Clancy rode with the cattle while he sat in his dingy city office, I do the same.  It is a blessing to know that even now, lives are changing, pilgrims are settling into their morning along the Camino de Santiago, sipping their morning coffee, rising and setting out, there steel shod sticks sounding out a staccato beat on the Iberian cobbles.  Even now.  

Keep it real peeps, remain simple and humble and gracious and pay attention to those small things that make a difference. 

And, like that kid who called out, remind and encourage each other to return to moments of blessing and memories of a job well done.

This one's for you man.

Buen Camino Peregrinos

Shane Altmann

The Pilgrim Principal

What Are You Worth?

I read in the paper yesterday that a sole, unregistered, mystery winner had won the 50 million dollar NSW Gold Lotto this week and had not at that point been identified or come forward to claim their prize.  The same thing happened a few weeks ago with the big 110 million dollar bonanza, an unregistered winner from Ipswich took a few days to come forward and claim their share of the booty.  I had a ticket in that one and as hard as I tried, I could just not make that person from Ipswich be me.

We like to fantasize about winning a fortune don’t we?  Well at least I do.  I am not one of those people who says, ‘Oh I wouldn’t know what to do with that much money!’  I could spend it no worries, there are a few beach houses I would love to live in that could soak up a fair bit of it quite easily.  But it’s a fantasy for sure, our lives are much more valuable and important than cash.  Dedication, endeavour, fair reward for meaningful work, these are the things that bring us more deep satisfaction than immense wealth.

Every time the water cooler conversation, or perhaps these days it’s the coffee machine conversation, turns to lotto fantasies I start to think about worth.  What are we worth?  How important is money to us?  Of course, we have our net worth and it slowly increases, particularly those of us who have been working for multiple decades (sigh).  We gradually pay off houses and cars and little by little we build wealth.  It doesn’t really feel like it when you are raising kids, particularly when you are paying school fees or trying to get a kid through uni, but I suppose that is building a different sort of value in ourselves and our kids too.

But the ‘lotto win’ conversation always gets me wondering what we are worth.  Not how much we are worth financially but how much is our integrity worth.  They say everyone has a price, at what point would you compromise your integrity, your values, your core beliefs for money.  Is it $100?  Is it $1000?  Is it $1,000,000?  Is it just the price of a movie ticket?  Is the answer on a sliding scale or should it always be the same?  Does the answer change when someone is watching, like your friends or your children?

In my experience as a school leader and principal I can tell you that there are two things about which people always lie.  Drugs and money.  They will lie about other things and cave in but those are the big two that people just cannot seem to capitulate to the truth with in my experience.  Drugs aside, as they are a rare and very different thing in most of our day to day lives, it is fascinating to me what people will do for money, what they will compromise, what they will do for cash.  One has to wonder what lessons we teach our children when we tell the person at the ticket booth that they are still under a certain age to get a few dollars off a movie ticket or park entrance, that is we will openly tell a lie in front of them … for cash.  All our words about truthfulness and honesty blow away like a puff of smoke when our kids see us compromise our honesty for a couple of dollars.  $5, $50, $50,000.  I wonder if you have done it, if you thought above that your honesty and integrity was worth thousands or millions, but then we realise it is only worth a couple of bucks sometimes.  Stings a bit.

The right thing to do is always the right thing to do.

It’s just that simple.

Buen Camino

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

Commonwealth Games Reflection

The Games

I am a sceptic.  Last year my wife was very keen to enter the lottery to go in the draw to get tickets to the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.  I relented.  I remember being sceptical enough not to get tickets to the Sydney 2000 Olympics and then regretting it once the games began and the hype increased.

Anyway, we got tickets to the Netball, the Athletics and the Rugby 7’s.  Watched the opening ceremony on TV, watched a bit of beach volleyball on TV, a bit of swimming and started to get hyped.

Then we went to the netball.  It was awesome.  The movement of people to and from venues, the volunteers and the positivity, the venues, the hype, the actual competition and sporting excellence, the vibe, the whole shebangabang completely overwhelmed my scepticism and we loved it.  I grabbed an extra ticket to go the hockey as well with a hockey tragic mate and loved that too.  Every occasion we had to be there we had the same experience, a truly world class competition and an internationally envious organization of the whole games.

And then came the closing ceremony.  Wasn’t that something.  We stayed up all night and watched that on telly.  Like many Australians we wondered about some of the song choices and the artists, we certainly wondered where the athletes were and suspected that the broadcasters were holding them until last to keep us glued to out telly as long as possible.  But they never came.  Sadly.

And then they cut to Johanna Griggs and Basil Sempilas.  That was a moon landing moment I reckon.  Those who saw it live will remember it for the rest of their lives.  It was quite shocking and unexpected and certainly added to the hype about the whole show.  I think it made the gap between the real and the ideal seem larger than it actually was.

I feel a bit sad about all of that negativity though.  I think one of the really good decisions that was made by the organisers was to include school kids and volunteers in both the opening and closing ceremonies.  Our College had a number of students participating in both, and ex-students as well.  They trained so hard, spent so many long nights for months in preparation, contributed selflessly to the event in service of something greater than themselves, and they shone.  The images we saw on TV of the life guards, the dancers, the kids with the glowing cubes, choirs, all of them were terrific.  Their enthusiasm and dedication was so obvious to see and should be applauded and praised.  The very spirit of the games that we all saw so openly each day through the service of the volunteers at events, for my money, was beautifully echoed in the participation of those kids from across Queensland and they deserve to be equally honored and cherished as such.

I think we need to be really careful when we criticise.  There is honour in heartfelt voluntary endeavour.  Some of the decisions that were made about that ceremony are right to be questioned, but overwhelmingly we should give thanks for that which is done on our behalf, without our request, in service of our greater good.

Particularly given we have just emerged from the Easter break.

Buen Camino