My Farewell to Saints Alive and the Ritual of Reflection
As I sit here about to embrace the next great adventure in this life I love, I feel curiously grateful for this once weekly, now fortnightly ritual that has enriched my life in so many ways. Even with the move to fortnightly editions of Saints Alive in the last couple of years (phew!) I worked out that I must have written over 900 articles during my time at All Saints. I have occasionally indulged in recycling or borrowed paragraphs from previous articles, but sharing my ideas with our community on a regular basis has become a precious part of my life.
The ideal process is to sit down on a Wednesday evening with uncluttered time, perhaps a cheeky glass of something grape-inspired and ruminate on what it is I feel like sharing this week. It might be a book or a poem that I have read which has elbowed its way into my consciousness; perhaps a school event that moved me to acknowledge and acclaim its effect on me; or maybe I have been grappling with a moral or ethical dilemma which convinces me my only hope of peace is to share my confusion with others.
As I consider these things, I am profoundly grateful for two things which are inextricably linked – receiving a good education and being afforded the inestimable privilege of having a platform and a ‘voice.’ My role as Headmaster has allowed me an undeserved but keenly grasped opportunity to ‘speak’ in the public domain. There exists an exquisite passage of time, sometimes just a moment, sometimes tortuously long, when one sits down with a head full of ideas, a pen to which one has some personal attachment (that might just be an idiosyncrasy of mine!) and a deliciously blank piece of paper.
There are too many people in our world with important things to say, to write, to teach us, who are simply denied a voice – an outlet which will let their voice be heard. Social media should have helped, and perhaps it has, but there exist algorithms on these platforms that seem to privilege the loudest rather than the wisest voices.
I hope that somewhere along the way during their time at All Saints our students have been encouraged to find their voice and to use it passionately and responsibly. As I prepare to lose an audience upon whom I have come to depend, for whom and to whom I have been writing these last 23 years, I just feel so grateful for the opportunity to have done so. Without wishing to sound melodramatic, this gentle discipline of sharing ideas and observations has, I believe, made me a better person. The process slows me down, requires me to reflect, to think, to wonder; it has been a calming and healthy influence in an otherwise busy life.
I think what I am about to suggest might be too little, too late; but I would love you to encourage your children to find a little time to write (rather than type) what matters to them. There is an irony here as I am typing right now, yet looking as I type at a piece of paper with untidy writing that has been ‘tidied up’ a little while I transform it into the format required for Saints Alive. My best ideas always seem to come from that precious relationship between pen, paper and imagination.
I think there is a small part of all of us that would like in some way to be immortal. In offering my students in Creative Writing the chance for immortality I would recite them Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet XVIII, a heartfelt love song which ends with its famous rhyming couplet:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I would share with them the truth that every time I recite this poem I think of this woman who Shakespeare loved and how she lives on (as does he), precisely because he chose to write about his love (at least 154 times in his sonnets)!
I am not for a moment seeking immortality through my ramblings in Saints Alive, but I am suggesting that there is value in setting time aside to write about things that matter to you – journals, poems, short stories, letters, articles, family histories.
So thank you for allowing me a voice these last 23 years; thank you for those of you who have been kind enough to compliment me on particular offerings over those years; thank you Mum and Dad for giving me a good education; and thank you to Whomever that divine presence that shapes our ends may be for instilling within us the impulse for creative expression.
Patrick Wallas
Headmaster
