When Graduation Feels Right: Congratulations Class Of 2012

The parenting journey is littered with stages and milestones that mark the passage of time and the getting of wisdom. Some of these milestones also represent significant gateways that irrevocably empower the individual and change the family dynamic. Our little family passed through one such gateway earlier this week, the one called high school graduation.

Two days ago we celebrated the Valedictorian Day of my eldest son, Future Baseball Star. It was a day filled with school tradition, of saying farewell to youth and a clearly defined path and embracing seniority and the responsibility that comes with empowerment for making decisions about the future. A day of hope and laughter, filled with promise and belonging.

The decision of where to send your child to high school is a weighty one. In this town it is usually decided and acted on at birth at which time your child becomes a name on a waiting list. We didn’t go down that road, largely because I wanted to choose a school that would match my child’s needs and personality and to make that call I needed something more to guide me than a bunch of foetal cells. In this town, the choice of high school is a favourite dinner party conversation topic and securing a place in a good high school is a competitive business.

We chose the boys’ high school because it felt right. Not because it was close, not because there was a family connection but because it’s student body comprised boys from all over Sydney and from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and nationalities. It felt right.

The traditions in which we participated on Valedictorian Day felt right.

The farewell song sung by the graduating year 12 class to the rest of the school at the Valedictorian assembly felt right. The engaging farewell speech given by the Head Prefect felt right. The announcement by the year 12 leadership of their year 11 successors and the symbolic handing over of their seats to the newly elected leaders felt right.

The farewell tunnel formed by the student body down which the boys of the graduating class marched to the beat of drums felt right. Watching the year 12 boys making their way through the tunnel whilst they embraced those teachers and mentors that impacted positively on their lives and shook the hands of the boys whose memories they wished to preserve felt right. Seeing little brother playfully punch his big graduating brother in the stomach at the start of the tunnel walk felt right.

Attending the boys’ final school chapel service at which the year 12 Head Prefect passed on a symbolic candle to a year 7 boy felt right. Certain year 12 boys each presenting to the school a symbol representing the areas of academic learning, pastoral care, community giving and co-curricular activities felt right. Hearing the year 12 boys shouting and clapping their way through their final war cry felt right. Sharing a valedictory lunch with our sons and watching them make the passing from “New Boy” to “New Old Boy” felt right.

Being forever part of the “New Boy” community and cheering on the black and white feels right. Being the mother of a high school graduate feels right. Delighting in the fact that I will have 50% less grey socks to fold and white shirts to iron feels right. Watching my child blossom and grow feels right. Handing my child the keys to controlling his destiny feels right. Supporting my son in the lead up to his final exams starting in three short weeks feels right.

Future Baseball Star reaching this milestone has created a new family dynamic. We now have a child with one foot firmly in the adult world and this is cause for celebration. Our stewardship as parents now enters a new phase and it feels right.

Congratulations to all of the boys who are part of the class of 2012, we honour your graduating achievement. It is now time for that last sprint to the final exams and to the destiny that you have worked towards for the past seventeen years, but more particularly during the last thirteen of them. You were the starting class of 2000 and reaching year 12 in 2012 is only fitting and feels right.

Good luck in the exams ahead!

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Do you have any graduating day memories? If you have children who have graduated how did you feel about them passing that milestone? Please share.

I Feel The Need… The Need to Read!

Top Gun, what a classic. Fighter pilots, men in uniform, men out of uniform, aviator sunnies with cheeky handles like “Iceman”, “Viper”, “Goose” and “Maverick”. It also gifted us some great lines, one of which I have borrowed and contorted for my own nefarious blog purposes. So whilst the remaining MiGs bug out, here’s a fantastic compilation video of Top Gun scenes with the song that has been playing in my head ever since I thought of the heading for this post.

I’m not going to be shooting down any enemy planes today, but I do feel invigorated. Why? Because today I refound my passion for reading books. This folks, is a big deal, huge, phenominal even!

To put this in context, a couple of years ago I used to be a voracious book reader, running at two to three a week. Mostly veg books, to use the expression of my fellow blogger, Eagle Eyed Editor. After a long day reading copious quantities of heavy and dry business material, I craved the escapist world of veg books, no thinking required, just pure emotion and verbage. All my books were paper books and I loved thumbing the pages, loved looking at the well used spines lined up like sentinels on my book shelf and loved rereading my favourites when the mood struck.

And then I stopped. Cold. I flirted briefly with reading some non-fiction books, but I never became so deeply immersed as when my imagination was ignited by fiction. The only real explanation I can think of why is that slowly or possibly not so slowly my reading habits changed from paper to online. Suddenly my reading became centered around blogs of all kinds, personal blogs of my WordPress friends, blogs about management and leadership, blogs about marketing and social media, newspaper and journalistic blogs, blogs about writing, and blogs about blogs!

image from microsoft clipart

Most of the material was and is engaging and it is material that as an Australian I would never have had access to before the online age. Suddenly there was a whole new world to explore and learn from. And it was all free and accessible whenever I needed. But I think it came at a price.

Blog pieces, or at least the best blog pieces, are less than a thousand words long and possibly even shorter than that. They are short sound bytes designed to tantalize and entertain and much territory could be covered in the space of an hour online. Get to the point and prove your expertise quickly or find yourself in the middle of a cavernous snoozefest. During my blog hopping phase I did pick up a book or three in the hope that I would once again find my reading passion and the buzz of immersion. Maybe they were the wrong books or maybe it was the environment, but more often than not I found myself stopping after five pages. That was until I read a couple of recent books, including the book I discussed in my last blog post

Today, my journey back to the book world reached a pivotal point, for today I wondered into my favorite bookshop. It is in fact the last of the giant bookstores in my city, three levels of tomes, stacked on pallets, stacked on shelves, well…just stacked! Today there was a promotion for a classical music CD taking place when I walked in and the sounds of a soulful cello played. The musician was in store with his cello and there was a buzz. Customers and store clerks milled about and there was some serious browsing taking place in the aisles.

Gratuitous aviator sunnies pic

I felt like it was almost a spiritual experience with a real sense of it feeling right. I savoured reading the book jackets and combing the shelves for an hour and I am happy to say came away with three books to read. It is time to be immersed, to be transported. It is time to read the marathon after a long time spent sprinting. I am revelling in this sense of anticipation and looking forward to getting reacquainted with turning pages, sneakily reading ahead and shutting the book cover when the last full stop has been read.

It is time to feed the need, the need to read!

Did you find the internet impacting your reading habits? Do you love to read? Do you sneakily read ahead?

The Gift Of A Journey: Windows in the Clouds by Stephen Byrne

How do you react when people tell you meaningful stories about their lives? Particularly those lives that are very different to your own? Do you listen with impatience or do you listen with intent? I cherish the moments when people let me enter their private worlds, when they give me a glimpse of the threads that have contributed to the fabric of their current being. To me, this sort of story is a gift.

Let me tell you about one such gift. The gift is the story of Stephen Byrne or as I know him, Steve. Now I don’t know about you, but I am not acquainted with too many pilots who can write nor too many authors who can fly – a rather intriguing combination of itself. But what makes this story a little bit more unique is that Steve also happens to be a paraplegic.

Steve’s story is documented in his autobiography, Windows In The Clouds, recently published by Zeus Publications.

Much like Steve’s life, the book comprises two distinct parts. The first part chronicles Steve’s early life and childhood years, the tree felling accident that changed his life in 1985 and its aftermath. The second part is more travel guide and through his story and the story of others, Steve documents his first solo overseas travel experience to the United States of America, a trip lasting seven weeks and taking in twenty-two States and a flying experience with Challenge Air.

Overseas readers will find the first part of the book particularly interesting because it contains many glimpses into small town, rural Australian life. Steve grew up and lived a lot of his life in the Southern NSW town of Cootamundra, which some of you may know as the birthplace of our most famous cricketer, Sir Donald Bradman. It is the story of a young child with dreams of living and working on the land, of clinging to the hope of one day owning his own farm and of putting a less than stellar family life behind him only to have those dreams snatched away through paraplegia. It is also the story of a young man struggling to come to terms with an irrevocable life change and of eventually refashioning his dreams and taking grasp of them.

What makes this book a pleasure to read is the depth of the writing. The main reason for its depth is that the author has quite a remarkable level of self-awareness. The fact that it comes from the male of the species is even more astonishing! Take this paragraph as an example:

I could just not cope with what had happened to me and I had turned into someone I didn’t like. Although I had survived a tree falling on me….I felt like a complete and utter failure. I looked around my farm and could find no real happiness. I had bought this block of land in the very real hope that it would help me to come to terms with what happened. Although I felt at times that I was in paradise here deep in the Australian bush, what was going on in my head was extremely dark.” [reproduced with the kind permission of Stephen Byrne]

I admit that I have only known Steve since his accident and in some ways I think that puts me at a distinct advantage. For I am not distracted by mourning what WAS, but rather I focus on celebrating what IS. And what IS, is a remarkable life, a published author and a talented pilot, most worthy of celebrating.

For this blog piece, I asked Steve what made him write this book, to which he replied:

” I wrote my book for a number of reasons. I suppose I had always wanted to write something about my life and what had happened to me, particularly my early life. The older I get, the more I realise just how much my early life has shaped the balance. I don’t want to keep going back into the past but unless I can deal with that it will always keep getting in the way of what I am doing now. I have also written what I have because I hope that my story may help others. It took me so long to really come to terms with what had happened to me and just how much it has affected my personality. The wheelchair only exacerbated all that was still lying under the surface. When I first tried to write my story fifteen years ago I gave up on it because I didn’t want to portray such a negative story. Over the intervening years things have changed in so many ways and there have been some real positives in there. I guess I have been able to, and I hope I have, outweigh the negatives with the positives.

To be able to put other people’s lives into my book I think brings some sort of balance to it all. I didn’t want to just talk about myself. Being able to tell other people’s stories takes the focus away from me a bit. Being able to also add a travel story adds to the mix.”

Whilst I have seen the story being described as “a story about overcoming spinal cord injury”, I don’t believe that this is an accurate description. Firstly, in my view, spinal cord injury cannot be overcome – its affects can be mitigated, sure, but the injury itself cannot be overcome as the spinal cord cannot repair itself. Secondly, to bill this book merely as the usual story of disabled inspiration sells it short, which is confirmed by Steve’s own words above. If you are inspired after reading the book – great – but you should read it for the depth of the writing, for the lessons which can be applied to your own life and for gaining an insight into a life different to your own.

As for the second part of the book, as a reader you feel like you are travelling for the first time, experiencing the thrill of mastering a new environment, of overcoming doubts and discovering just about anything is possible. There is a real sense of wonder that permeates though it, together with some wonderfully humorous anecdotes. Watch out for the Kansas City incident, it’s a real pearler!

Steve with a couple of mutual friends of ours, Tony and Randy (RIP)

I know more than a few writers read my blog so I finally asked Steve about the publishing experience. Steve had this to say:

“Being able to get someone to think that this was worth publishing was a big step. I had thought about self publishing but didn’t want to go down that road because having someone else publish my book was an affirmation that it was something worth doing.”

The book was certainly worth doing and is certainly worth reading. It is the gift of a journey.

You can purchase the book through Amazon here and visit Steve’s website, Parapilots, here.

What’s the most interesting biography or autobiography that you have read? Would you ever contemplate writing your own life story?