Have you ever looked up during heavy rainfall?
It’s an oddly liberating thing to do. Slightly foolish, unquestionably damp, but liberating all the same. By choosing a different direction that nobody else seems remotely interested in, you often end up seeing something remarkable. Even if the price of admission is a very wet face and a vague sense that you may have misjudged your life choices.
Goodness knows we’ve had ample opportunity to try this over the past month. Our friends down the road at the University of Reading announced last week that they’ve just recorded the longest unbroken spell of rainfall ever at their Atmospheric Observatory. By last Thursday, it had already passed 25 consecutive days. At this point, trench foot feels less like a remote medical condition and more like an inevitability.
But seriously, look up. There’s real pleasure in adopting a different perspective.
You may already know that I’m spectacularly afraid of heights and yet endlessly fascinated by falling. I’ve never quite understood how those two things manage to coexist, and yet they do, very noisily.
My fear is not the mild, companionable kind that produces a thoughtful “ooh, that’s quite high.” Instead, it arrives fully formed: knees liquefy, palms sweat, and reason quietly excuses itself from the room. I can be two floors up, leaning out of a perfectly respectable window and my body will react as though I’ve just been informed – without warning – that gravity has recently become optional. I become irrational. Deeply, inventively irrational.
And yet, despite this, I love the idea of falling.
Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule at 128,100 feet on 15th October 2012 and plummeted towards Earth like a determined exclamation mark. I watched in baffled reverence, the way that medieval knights might have regarded dragons: with awe, disbelief, and a quiet certainty that this was not something one did for fun. My brain simply couldn’t process the idea that someone voluntarily left space and thought it seemed sensible.
Even so, I can see how the opposite perspective (the view on the way down) might be magnificent. Cliff-diving championships exist, attended by people who actively seek out the next vertical slab of rock. Films luxuriate in it. Avatar alone gives us endless free-falling through rainforest canopies, drifting leaves, and lyrical peril. Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ manages to frame it as a lifestyle choice, underpinned by the coolest electric-guitar chord progression.
Then there’s gravity itself. Do things fall at different rates? Galileo said no, though admittedly he wasn’t standing at the edge of El Capitan watching Alex Honnold free-climb with the serene expression of a man thoughtfully selecting avocados.
Despite my abject terror, I understand the dream of flying through the air. Only around 40 per cent of us ever experience it in our dreams – usually when we’re young – which suggests that adulthood gradually replaces wonder with a clipboard and a risk assessment. I’m still keen, though, to look up at something coming down, hovering just long enough to imagine myself doing it too, with the assistance of negotiable gravity.
LWC continues to navigate the rainclouds and headwinds, always looking up and out towards the horizon. In an education sector where schools and colleges are finding life increasingly difficult, we continue to go against the direction of travel and view things from a different perspective.
The key is not to look down and fixate on the height, but to keep looking up – seeking out new opportunities.
Even when it feels counterintuitive.
Even when it leaves you with dripping eyebrows.
Thank you to everyone who has attended the Strategy 2030 mornings so far (and keep signing up, please). We love our journey in helping to transform the thinking of the UK education sector. Your children (and you as parents) are playing a central role in that.
Have a great half-term. There will be inevitable hosepipe bans upon our return…
Yours,
Adam
