I’m not a great lover of the month of August. For me it has always been a betwixt and between time; the usual warmth of the summer sun is disappearing, the days are beginning to shorten. Change is in the air, and yet we’re not quite into the crisp freshness of the autumn with its intensity of sharp seasonal change and the iridescent colours of the countryside. It’s a month uncertain of where it belongs, neither fish nor fowl.
But in this month of August whose last day is this one what I often try to do is to undertake all those tasks of tidying, sorting and organising which should’ve been done in the spring but clearly with annual repetition and predictability I end up not achieving.
So it was last weekend that I found myself with my equally prevaricating 10-year-old in a futile attempt at tidying a bedroom and specifically trying to organise the shelves of her bookcase. And as the young, determined individual she is she was very sure about the categories which she wanted to use in the organising of her books and one of them was ‘adventures.’
She has a lot of books about adventures! But I quickly concluded as we agreed to disagree that her concept of adventure was somewhat different to my own. It made me start to think about what the word ‘adventure’ really means. What is it that constitutes an adventure in both literature and maybe more so in life itself?
It’ll come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I soon delved into the etymology and root meaning of the word. I discovered that the word ‘adventure’ has at its root a Latin word ‘adventurus’ which has the connotation and has the meaning of ‘about to arrive’ and ‘ about to happen’ and indeed is the root of the word advent which is used for the weeks before Christmas.
It wasn’t until the mediaeval period in the 13th century that the word was first used to suggest an activity of uncertainty, of risk or chance and at the same time fun and enjoyment.
I couldn’t help thinking about that sense of adventure, of risk taking, of doing the unpredictable and the unexpected when I sat and listened to some of the words of the Prime Minister in his alternative Number 10 garden party last Tuesday. In a speech which was the very reverse of ‘you’ve never had it so good’ we had ‘the worst is still to come.’ Negative foreshadowing and warnings of doom and gloom not least in the coming October budget.
Now I’m not for one minute belittling or demeaning the challenges which this new government is facing or the decisions that both it and as a consequence the Scottish Government may have to make. Indeed, anybody working in the world of social care could not escape the reality of challenge of these days both fiscally, operationally and humanly.
But surely it is how you respond to such challenges that is important? Is our response to be one of appropriate adventure and calculated risk taking or one of passive acceptance and compliance?
‘Walk on air against your better judgement’ is the phrase which appears as an epitaph on the grave of one of my all-time favourite poets the Irishman Seamus Heaney, the anniversary of whose death was yesterday.
The quote is in his 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech though it first appeared in an earlier poem. In a 2008 interview Heaney was asked why he chose it. He said:
“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvellous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry.”
The historian Eugene Kielt said of the phrase:
“It is a beautiful line, very inspirational. It is about going for it. We are naturally cautious and sometimes someone should throw caution to the wind… It is about keeping your feet on the ground but looking up as well. It is about risk taking and not being inhibited, losing your inhibitions.”
Is that not in essence what adventurousness is all about? Yet perhaps those of us who work and breathe the life of care and support are more used to risk assessment, of calculating and weighing up to such an extent that it paralyses us from taking the step out into the unknown into the unpredictable.
Over the years working with adults who have used care and support services I have often heard the plea from people that they should be allowed to step out into the bravery of the unknown, that their lives should not be limited and curtailed because of the fears of others; that there is more to life than every moment being assessed on a matrix of safeguarding and protection.
This past week I have felt as August ends and perhaps more than ever before that the whole social care community in Scotland needs to discover some of the brave invitation of Seamus Heaney and to walk on air against our better judgment. I think the time has long since come that those who use care and support services, those who provide them and work in them, should grasp the control wheels and take the future map of our sector away from the hands of politician and policy maker.
Life if it is anything is an adventure. Social care if it is about anything is about enabling people to discover the fulness of life and to reach for and thrive to their potential. It is about walking on air against our better judgment.
So as the autumn months start, I intend to be braver and more adventurous, to spend time living in and pulling myself into a future which is a human happening all around us. Caution should not curtail but find itself thrown into the air.
Where is our spirit of adventure? Where are the places and spaces where we can walk on air? Where are the people prepared to join us in communities which create possibility rather than seek to fulfil pessimistic despair?
The social care adventure starts with our feet on the ground of reality but our heads and hearts breathing the air of hope.
Donald Macaskill
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash
