Foolhardy Fellowships

 

Presumptions can be foolish. The coach pointed at me. “You should all run like him. Do that again in slow-motion, boyo. Let’s see that perfect style of yours in action.” Well, for about 20 yards or so, I did it, focusing on the precision of ‘my style’. Being only 12 years old, I knew nothing, really, of ‘how to run.’ The sense of it came naturally to me. And as for ‘slow-motion,’ that too, for me, was just a concept. In those early years of the 60’s, going to movies in South Africa, for me, was a most infrequent thing, and I do not recall having ever seen slow-motion. So, on that hot and sweaty Sports Day I tried to present what I thought it might look like. “That’s good enough,” yelled the coach to stop me. “See,” he told the others, “that’s how to run.”

We were in the Pilditch Stadium grounds, just behind the soaring concrete structure, warming up. It was at last the all-schools’ meet, and I’d always made first in my own school’s playground, so sprinting was a delight. And now here, from the start, I’d impressed the coach with my take-offs. After all, with school practices, I’d come up with reacting to the ‘Buh…,” and did not wait for the “...ang!” of the teacher’s yell. Now, with this new teacher taking a special liking to me while warming us up, with each of us from a different school for the 100 yards dash, I thought I’d have the race ‘in the bag.’

And then, soon enough, we were in the big stadium. My first time. It felt very exciting to see all those people there. The grandstands looked full. The huge field had all sorts of simultaneous events going on. Long jump. High jump. Discus-throwing. There were even races like the 220 yards, the 440, and the fifteen-hundred-yard runs. I’d never conceived of them. (But no one, I discerned, sprinted quite like me.) They even had a real gun! Our impoverished school, Burgher Right Primary, had not had such things. Nor had we even had a track on which to practice. We ran on uneven ground. And a stake at either end had demarcated the start and stop of the 100 yards over a lumpy and uneven lawn. Never mind. I’d been the fastest in my school. And now, here at the big event with our warm-ups just done, I’d shown myself the fastest off the white line, and the best in style too. Sure, I was the only one in bare feet, (as I recall it,) but shoes would just weigh me down. So, when at last ready, with about eight or ten of us at the start line, I was determined to show all the people in the stands just how fast I was.

Hubris. Arrogance. Self-righteousness. These were not terms in my ken, back in those days. Nor was the obverse of those debilitating terms, with universal concepts like compassion, empathy, or concomitance. I was a boy, and like most of my fellows, I thought the best way to be a boy was to best others on every occasion. After all, ‘competition’ was designed to prove just who was ‘best’. So was swimming. So was running. So too, even, were exams.

But a strange thought overcame me as I waited for the, “On your marks!” command. What if I slow-motioned my start, and my run too, and showed them all how it’s done? Surely the very force of my energy would control the others, and we all would run in a slow motion too, and…?

Well, I came dead last. I recall the others springing up, with me still at the starter’s line, and then my still, foolishly, determinedly, running in slow-motion, perfectly, all the while intent on drawing the others back to run that way too. But of course, I never caught up.

Somewhere in our makeup is the sense that our behaviours, our connection, our similarities, are only individualized by the shells of our molecular inheritance. ‘All we need is love.’ All we need is each other. All we need is empathy, compassion, integration, and cooperation, so that others similarly, if not simultaneously, may conduct themselves the same way we do. But real life teaches us that birds of a feather do tend to gather, and even they have their pecking order. We generally have a compulsive need to be first, or better than, or at least be a part of, so that we can be secure with who we are, what we do, and even how we think. Yet I’m of a mind that right now, in the eighth decade of my life, with our world on fear-filled tenterhooks, one is best not to expect one’s behaviours to affect all others, other than to keep being the best that one can be.