Outside the Box Friday 12th June 2020 Great Minds Don’t Think Alike
A newsletter helping the Box Hill School community stay together, stay informed and stay happy.
Recovery, refocus and readiness A warm welcome back after what we hope was a restful and safe half term break. With the lockdown beginning to ease after nearly ten weeks, we turn our attention to the way forward. Huge uncertainty still lies ahead, but there seems now to be path through to some version of ‘normality’; a return to physical school, to being able to visit friends and families, but not to our lives as they were before the COVID-19 crisis. That world is gone. So, what’s next? In Buddhist thinking, everything that exists is constantly changing and will eventually come to an end. This first “universal truth” (known as anicca or impermanence) gives rise to the second “universal truth”, called dukkha in the Pali language of the Buddha; the truth of suffering. For the Buddha, because we crave permanence where none exists, we are inevitably disappointed, leading to suffering and ‘unsatisfactoriness’ – the sense that there can be no true contentment. As the revered Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh states; “it is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”
Wellbeing Tasks Go out of your way to be kind to someone else Do something that makes you uncomfortable – work on a tough problem, go for a hard run, take a cold shower. Reflect on it once it is done – was it really that bad? Was the dread of the thing worse than the thing itself? Read a book – it doesn’t matter what, just something you love Achieve something, ideally something tangible, then tick it off your list
Norwegian photographer Eirik Solheim glued a camera to a window shelf in his home and rigged it to take a picture every thirty minutes for a year. From more than 16,000 digital images the camera fed into a computer system, he selected 3,888 daytime photos. By taking one vertical line from each of those images in sequence and compiling them from left to right, he created this single photograph encompassing all four seasons. (Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/impermanence-is-buddha-nature-embrace-changemay-2012/)
As the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it; “the only thing that is constant is change”. The secret to living in a constantly changing world, such as the one in which we now find ourselves, is to change with it. You’ll go FAR. Be Flexible – develop the skills to adapt quickly to a changing environment Be Accepting – there is nothing you can do to change what has happened Be Resilient – develop the ability to bounce back quickly