Dear Friends of Boundless:
The kids went home yesterday for a brief immersion in their urban realities – those same realities that furnished the reasons they came to Boundless in the first place.
I worry. Silly old me. They’ll be back on Halloween day, donning whatever masks they’ll need to navigate rapidly changing expectations. They’ll be okay. So I tell myself.
We’ll start demanding lots of things from them again. They’ll adapt. And I’ll force chocolate into their bellies.
We may very well be the only boarding school on the continent that is masochistic enough to allow week-long interludes between six-week sessions. Doing so beckons the burden our teachers must face for helping the kids navigate withdrawal, behavioural or otherwise, all over again.
I wondered aloud a few nights ago to the group, around a sultry campfire, as we were celebrating the session’s accomplishments.
“How many of you are going to do the same chores back home that you do up here?”
They muted their chuckles, but I could see their grins backlit by the stars.
I listened to their tales of wonder. Half of them kept referring to the damn whitewater. To Rifle Chute. To actually running it. Surviving it. I am thinking, sheesh, you guys stacked wood for old ladies, planted trees for biology, built bush bridges, learned to speak, socialize, fantasize, improvise and you are most touched by a set of rapids?
I felt like screaming, “Poppycock!” a phrase perilously close to “get off my lawn.”
So I muted myself too.
Then Kennan, an all star student and the chosen facilitator for the evening, asked, “What danger did you turn towards and face?” Here are four samples that stood out for me.
“At the beginning, I felt there was no room for me. But the group let me make space.”
“I knew I wouldn’t make it to day 20. I don’t finish much of anything. I literally counted on it. On day 19 I knew that I had to make this last. So I did.”
“Dave (our science teacher) believed in me which made me believe in me. I passed science. I got a seventy.” Dave whispered to me afterwards and said, “Well, almost a seventy.”
“My anxiety was on fire. I turned squarely to face it.”
Our teachers took their turns with the question as well. One said,
“I overthink everything. I stopped doing that this session. Lesson planning is becoming easier.”
I’m marveling at the wonder of it all in my almost rocking chair at age 62, a Greek Tiresias in Training, born under the credo that one should suck things up and use mortality as a teacher, beholding a group of staff and students that are united under the credo of self-revelation. Of laying it bare in front of each other. The notion that obstacles should be overcome with support. Where mental health issues are totally okay to talk about.
My dad, a legendary proponent and role model of “suck it up”, is chuckling in his grave at the irony. “Ah,” he says, “The Kumbaya of it all.”
Thank you all for being on this journey with us.
Warmly (in response to the morning chill that has finally arrived),
Steven
