As you know I had a bit of an unusual Christmas this year as I headed off to Texas, including some beautiful big skies and amazing cacti in the Chihuahuan desert.
Now apart from doing lots of hiking through the desert, being in the States also allows for full immersion in American History and Politics and not only was I fortunate enough to go to the site of JFK’s memorial and learn lots about his assassination and its aftermath, I also learned a huge amount about the decade which followed his death, including the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war and the space race. The sixties in America was a fascinating, complex time and we shouldn’t take for granted the influence globally which the changes wrought in that decade in the States had on us all, whether that be Lindon B Johnson’s championing of desegregation, the assassination of Martin Luther-King, Elvis’ bursting onto the cultural scene or the protesting against the conscription of young men to fight the most pyrrhic of wars in Vietnam.
It was a time of people battling for rights, agitating for change and exploring all kinds of innovative ways of doing things. Just like now, in fact.
I was lucky enough to go to NASA – on Christmas Eve no less- and sit in the Mission Control room where the agents sat as they guided Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 onto the Moon on July 20 1969. We heard the recordings of the last 15 minutes before the eagle landed so to speak, and saw on the screens exactly what they would have seen.
It was intensely moving to essentially re-live such a significant moment in our human experience and I found it truly inspiring to think about the expertise, endeavour and endless rounds of failure which had led to that moment of success. No one more than a team of space agents understands the need to get things wrong before they get them right and as JFK himself put it – the necessity of doing things not because they are easy but because they are hard – and that’s a mantra I want you to adopt in all of your learning and playing and participating this term. Don’t avoid the hard stuff – it’s what will lead to the greatest sense of achievement, the feeling of satisfaction when you’ve pushed through what is difficult out to the other side.
Me being me, I spent lots of time in NASA asking where the women were and so am delighted to let you know that the current project for the agency is a joint mission with six other nations to put the first woman on the Moon.
And here it is – the Artemis project – all about breaking barriers of space travel and societal norms. So – mind the pun – watch this space, and I hope that as a school we can gather together to watch the moment that the first woman sets foot on the moon, just as back in 1969 the world gathered to watch the first man. Wouldn’t that be something.
But when it comes to setting goals for ourselves, when it comes to achieving success through failure, we can’t all go to the moon. Some of you might, who knows, but for most of us it will be quieter successes which inspire us, more earth-based, mundane achievements which make us feel proud of ourselves. What will yours be this term, this calendar year even? What small aspects of your approach to life are you going to build on, slowly but surely, in order to become the fullest, most fulfilled version of yourself as you make your way through the school year?
One woman I came across in the States who hadn’t been on my radar particularly was someone called Lady Bird Johnson, first Lady and wife of Lindon B Johnson, who took over the presidency after the assassination of Kennedy. A champion of nature, Lady Bird Johnson pushed forward a number of significant bills which led to the creation of national parks such as the one I went hiking in and she was an early climate campaigner, trying to get an increasingly industrialised America to understand the reverence which should be paid to nature, and the importance of having beautiful things around us to feed our souls as well as to improve our air quality.
I’ve become a bit of a fan of Lady Bird Johnson and her quiet force, and of the fact that like so many women seemingly in the shadows she actually wielded power to be a voice for change and an innovator.
I’m going to leave you with some advice from her for our new year, and it goes like this: “Let your reach exceed your grasp always. And make your little plot in this world greener because you walked there.” I love this. Of course, like those astronauts we should let our reach exceed our grasp, we should do the hard thing because it is hard – but we can also make a difference in this world simply by tending our own little plot, making it greener because we walked there. Obviously the gardening club will be all over this as a mission, and in a very literal sense this quotation is about looking after our school site and our environment more widely; but it’s also about who we are as well as what we do, because we’re all Wimbledonian, and we can all spread our Wimbledonian greenness wherever we go, showing compassion to others, curiosity as to the people and ideas around us, trying our best to be great scholars as well as authentic, brave human beings, and bringing light to shadowy corners whenever and wherever we can. So, in 2023 let’s listen to Lady Bird Johnson and water our plots, loving the patch of the earth we inhabit and the people with whom we share it. Have a great term.
This was the text of Fionnuala Kennedy’s start of term assembly on 6 January 2023.