When I was young, the summers were like sweet, hazy dreams which, annually, I was shaken from. They were, as they sit in my memory, summers shaped without the burden of adult attention, and carefree and wild.
Summers were as if they were plagiarized from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, except with an early 1980s haircut and riding a BMX bicycle.
Then September hit like a brick wall. Here are your new shirts and pants, here is your pencil case and backpack, please leave your imagination and creativity in a box at home which, if you behave accordingly, can be unpacked next June or July.
My excitement about a new hockey season always seemed to be overshadowed by an anxiety which felt airborne as school returned. The anxiety started in the pit of my stomach and didn’t end until around 5 pm each night. The fear made my backpack feel as if it was a chunk of the steel with two shoulder straps cutting into my skinny shoulders.
School was a foreboding foreshadowing of things to be in life. We were taught a crushing social order in school, and it was punishingly cruel and merciless. The poor kids were ostracized for the clothes they wore, the rich kids were glorified, and the really rich kids were not present, instead they hid at private schools soaking in an unjust advantage.
I stood in-between, bewildered and just happy to avoid the bully and his threats, which always included my face getting a physics lesson by the sidewalk. The mostly well-meaning teachers taught the script and education felt more like a retribution adults enforced spitefully for having to grow up.
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde famously said: “Youth is wasted on the young.”
With the passage of time, or at least how we perceive it, perspective creates a kind of wisdom. Now I am considered old; I do not want to waste wisdom, as well.
Watching my best friend’s grandchild play, for a fleeting instant, I saw the world through his one-year-old eyes. Charlie doesn’t know how to hate, or even hurt another soul. We, as a society of people with schools and industry, have yet to teach him these distasteful behaviours. In the continuous nature versus nurture debate, I see nurture as the clear winner.
Of course, there is no one single answer to any question. Neuroscience is uncovering biochemicals in our brain which electrify and influence how we act, think and live. My childhood fears, which spilled into adult life, were the result of high cortisol levels, a chemical associated with fear, and my amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for fight, flight or freeze primal response, was sadly malfunctioning.
Through meditation, medication and a bunch of years, I can see clearly that fear should never be used as a motivator in any context of life. The ease of how I recall memories of my childhood summers and the rigid anxiety with which I recount those September months is my personal proof of the failings of fear-based thinking and doing in the school of life.
Robert Skender is a qathet region freelance writer and health commentator.
