You’ll have seen this week that the seemingly inevitable happened in the US as we witnessed how power, unchecked and unbalanced by compassion and lawfulness, led to tragedy. In a response to this on twitter, Jimmy Wales – who is co-founder of Wikipedia – said this: ‘the only long-term route to peace, prosperity, and freedom, is knowledge. We should all share a passion for a more thoughtful, more educated world’.
We already know that educating girls globally will have one of the most significant impacts on saving our climate – and Wales is right when he says that the key more generally to a freer, more peaceful, more prosperous world is a more thoughtful, more educated one.
And so on Monday I reminded our amazing young people of the following: they are far more powerful than they realise, and hugely privileged too. Whatever their background or demographic, and whatever the situation they are in because of this pandemic: they have access to a world-class education. That is a huge privilege and a joy. And they have also been gifted with excellent, agile brains, and the opportunity to exercise them to the full extent of their capability – and there is nothing we need more, right now, than young people who are thoughtful and curious and compassionate. The people who are getting us out of this mess – the scientists developing vaccines, the doctors tending to the critically ill, the psychologists and social workers supporting the vulnerable – and the people helping us through – the writers, the creators, the artists, the composers, who nourish our souls – these are people who know the value of knowledge and thought, and more importantly the on-going pursuit of wisdom. So if we can do anything to help us out of our own sense of helplessness, it is to continue to furbish our minds – to read, listen, discuss, enquire and find out – because those are the life-long habits which will allow us to add to our societies with real purpose and positivity. Of course we must respect our bodies – exercise them, feed and water them, let them rest – but above all, we must furbish our minds. Our ability to learn new things, to examine new ideas, to recognise problems and figure out how to solve them, to anticipate and to reflect, are our greatest tools in life and none of these needs to lie fallow whilst in lockdown. If anything – now is the time for us to find, dust down and sharpen those tools.
We also must not underestimate the mind’s power to narrate our experience to us. Milton in Paradise Lost tells us that “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..” Adopting habits of mind based more on gratitude than resentment, more on noticing the kindness of others than their foibles, more on the hope than the despair, will not just make us feel better – it will actually make us believe our experience to BE better. The mind is its own place- so we must flood that place with light & warmth as much as we can.
And so, we begin the year with an intellectual call-to-arms: if we cannot live adventurously at the moment, we can certainly read adventurously, we can explore in our minds with abandon and, dare I say it, even think a little bit dangerously. Freedom lies within, and our minds can always provide uncharted terrain, albeit from the confines of the same four walls.