I was born
on the 31st of July. It’s the last day of the month. My mother says
I was born on the 1st August but the Nurse on duty couldn’t be
bothered to rule up a new ledger for a new day and the clock on the wall read a
few minutes past 12. So I guess I never really knew if I was a winner or a
loser. Coming last or coming first? The truth is I don’t really mind either
way. If you want me to come last I can. If you want me to come first I might
try. I’m not a particularly competitive spirit and would often rearrange games
as such, so there really was no winner and no loser. Recently while
volunteering in a Homework Program for children a lovely young girl decided we
should play scrabble without the points. I suddenly felt lighter. So did she. I
did a quick calculation halfway through the game to see if the children had
really scored less points than the previous competitive game. They hadn’t.
Healthy competition isn’t always so bad at all but sometimes we all just need a
break to be equal and free.
What I was
more interested in when the recounting of my birth took place, in the words of
my mother, was where I was born. I was born in Paddington Sydney. This suited
me enormously well because I loved Paddington Bear and bears in general. I
usually brought bears along to play dates. They all had a name and a place and
a set of handmade clothes. Let me tell you, making a tuxedo for a bear is no
mean feat but bikinis are a piece of cake and even Paddington had one of them!
Bears are a
curious comfort to children and according to the New York University Psychoanalytical
Institute “the transitional object may be conceived of in three ways: as
typifying a phase in child’s development; as a defence against separation anxiety
and lastly, as a neutral sphere in which experience is not challenged. I
suppose quite simply, bears won’t run away, are soft and cute and hold a
relationship in fiction to to our real and natural healing world. The gift of a
bear for me was all about comfort and understanding and nature. It was never
anything to do with coming first or coming last. After all, Paddington always
said;
“I’m a very
rare kind of bear…there aren’t very many of left where I come from”
and he
seemed to believe in his uniqueness. I’m not sure Paddington was interested in
being the winner either but he seemed wrapped in hopeful and grateful spirits.
For some
people competition is part of their job or personal hobbies. I think that’s
good for them too. It’s pretty lame when competition turns into a bit of a golumesque
pain in the behind though. That’s right, there are some people who can’t
possibly function unless they tell you just how much of a winner they are in
some of the most subtle and in some cases, outrageously revolting ways. The
trouble is, the big noter in the room comes off as the loser for anyone who
feels like simply making their own way step by step forwards towards something
of achievement.
In some countries,
including the one in which I live they wish to use mandatory testing as a
mechanism for assessing performance and support for the individual needs of
children. The trouble with these kinds of tests eg Naplan is that they are used
in comparative and competitive ways rather than individual and flexible ways
and they tend to disadvantage indigenous communities, those with English as a
Second Language and even children who have serious anxiety issues and do not
perform well under testing conditions. Assessment tools and even uniform ways
of assessing students can be modelled for teachers and learnt and delivered,
but there’s no real reason why it doesn’t happen privately and in a forum that
dispenses with the ladder board result. Where extra funding for schools that involves
children at risk of falling through the cracks might arise, Teachers and
principals are more than capable of using these assessment tools to document
and submit proposals to Educational Departments. Sometimes competition is
counterproductive to equality and human dignity. We need to be careful of that.
My all-time
favourite television show as a child involved a real life bear named Ben.
Grizzly Adams was something of peace gentleness and a oneness with nature. The television
show dispenses with blokey machoism’s and winning the race motifs to something
of men that were very gentle and thoughtful. There was something hopeful and reassuring
about these kinds of male portrayals for me as a child. I like bears and
donkeys and zebras so this television show combined some decent characters with
some of my favourite animals. Now the Donkey is more of a creature than meets
the eye. Donkeys are seemingly stubborn but they are also incredibly intelligent. They
will not forget anything. They can remember the same place they might have been
25 years before. They are capable of independent thinking but they also love to
be loved in a herd but if there aren’t other donkeys about, they don’t mind
crossing species to live with other animals such as goats. If they were people,
there would be little racism in donkey land. Most importantly a donkey is not
actually stubborn at all. A Donkey is very in touch with danger. They won’t
move until the safety of their kind and even human beings in their space is
being attended to. The donkey is a gorgeous animal. Zebras are a bit similar.
Lions are vicious killers that fight, compete and protect. They are fast and
territorial. They are beautiful creatures too. In nature we have the full gamut
of personalities too. The relationship between the bear and the man in this
television show was perhaps alighting in children and adults alike, our pull to
the bear, the wild, the domestic homely love that aches in those who feel alone
mistreated or shunned. Those put last. Those forgotten.
Shakespeare
is a bit overdone in our world in my opinion and new theatre work by new
writers should take precedent. Nevertheless, there is so much in Shakespeare to
inspire us and to use as a springboard so, we should never forget either. Watching an interesting Q and A session on Australia’s
ABC recently that discussed the Great feather capped genius himself, prompted a
reflection of my own. Shakespeare was somewhat antiemetic in his portrayals of Jews
which seems easily forgotten by all. I still like to see Shakespeare performed,
if executed differently and with new cultural and social understandings as a
winning force. Now that’s a winner I can call up in the first place kind of way.
It was done very well in Hollywood with Romeo and Juliet. In that case it was a
winning result, a winner within itself and for the people who made it that is! I’ve
seen less well known groups at many different spheres of society tackle Shakespeare too,
in; community settings, with young people, more mature people, in schools with
people who have a disability, with culturally diverse communities and the list goes
on. I was involved in Two different adaptations involving people with and without a disability, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. It’s true that People have made
some beautiful pieces from a basis of Shakespeare’s work that have shaken up
conventions and brought us closer to gender and cultural truths and equality at
times. I’d like to see the Jewish Roles
rewritten and completely renamed, not just for certain outrageously antiemetic
lines to be removed. Shakespeare however, gave women some meaty roles. He was
an early feminist in my opinion even though he wasn’t always one but given the
time in which they were written he was doing better than most on that front. He
was brave in his reflection of society in some ways, especially where the
ruling class was concerned. There were no teddy bears, but bears certainly did
rate a mention that’s for sure. Perhaps most famously is the bear in A Winters Tail. There’s
some great debates over why it was that Antigonus is eventually mauled by a
bear. It is my belief that it is a symbol of the bullying by Leontees which is everyone’s undoing in the end and which results in much lost love. When
competition turns into bullying people lose, society is hit hard and, well, the
spirit of Paddington aint nowhere to be seen.
In the
words of Hamlet, To be or not to be, that is the question? Ophelia in this
play, is for me Shakespeare’s female rebellion. She may seem at odds with
sanity, she may seem bawdy and wild and irrational at times and yes sadly she
does not win her battle with sadness under all of it. She is however more of a
kickass character than Juliet for she isn’t caught up in demure white and
conventional prettiness. She’s no show pony for the court and she does hold
love in her heart within a complexity that can be hard to wrangle with
especially with Hamlet being a little bit too self-obsessed sometimes. And isn’t
it so that “madness” is more in those most wise;
“The
Extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what The Public calls Madness.” Jean Cocteau.
So let us
BE whatever number we can manage, number one or no number at all. Slow and
steady wins the race says Ms Tortoise and I suspect the Tortoise wasn’t really
wanting to be in the race at all and was just hoping for a good swim in the sea
or a warm nap on the sand and they forced her into something she was not made for anyway. Sometimes we are drawn into other people’s dark spots and then a light
spot from a different direction pops up, someone else who cared or remembered us
and we didn’t even know it till later. You win some light and it’s all for free
and it’s so lovely. Look after each other. Life is a gift. Winning is in the
eye of the beholder as is beauty. You’re beautiful.
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