Hello friends and anonymous internet wanderers,
I have just returned from a week-long international conference at a boarding school in northern Germany. The conference was part of a larger global organisation, but nonetheless was essentially organised by the youth for the youth (with adult supervision and mentoring, mind you). These youth came from boarding and day schools all over the world, bearing only two apparent things in common: the english language and membership to the organisation. I can tell you now that, for the first time, I have realised that there is a staggering canyon-like crevice between real-time observation and hindsight; that in hindsight this conference was no less than absolutely magical. Having returned on Sunday 16th October in the afternoon, I immediately felt an odd presence of loneliness, a familiar sense which one encounters after experiencing a constant period of social high. This loneliness was coupled with intense nostalgia and longing, along with a mild sense of confusion. The latter was brought about by waking up at 6:00 AM GMT on a memory foam mattress in my own bedroom, forgetting briefly that I was no longer lying on the top bunk of an IKEA flat pack ordeal with the ceiling half a metre above my head. It was like the entire world which I had been living for the past week had just melted away, the bubble had burst and it was back to reality, only leaving memories and that familiar funny feeling. So here I sit now writing this, nostalgically listening to a playlist full of tracks played during the week which I only half-learned the words to, with a strepsil in my throat because (obviously) I got sick during the week.
N.B I would like to say that I will not be intentionally disclosing the name of the conference, nor the school which organised it. This is to ensure that the following post is not interpreted as an advertising feat or critical review, as well as maintaining the privacy of the people attending and organising the conference. It is purely my personal insight of an international gathering, an insight which in my own experience serves its purpose best when certain details are kept anonymous as to not meddle with the intended context, if that makes sense.
7:38AM
The basic underlying idea of the conference can be summarised like this: a gathering of student delegates from schools all over the world in order to participate in activities of community service, adventure and discussion. During the course of the week we saw keynote speakers come and go, each and every single one of them unfailingly leaving behind eyes welled up with tears and standing ovations as well as lengthy debate and pressing questions.
Over and over again the keynote speakers and principal would address the crowd of mere mortals varying in age between 14 and 19 years as “pioneers of the future”. For a week we were nothing short of the leaders of the next generation, who were in the most fortunate position from which we could change the world, if we so wished. Terribly exciting.
Several underlying, yet pressing thoughts settled at the back of my mind during the course of the week. These reoccurring feelings, which I will attempt to describe in this post, were ignited by moments of inspiration or intense frustration and are worth a post to talk about. There is a general notion that if you place a group of young people who have never met before in a room together, you can expect one of the following two things to happen:
- A heated discussion of some kind. It will start with general group small talk, with all the curiosity and awkwardness that is generally associated with first time encounters. Jokes will be made, mutual friends and connections established; the brief biography of the individual will flow out like a river. Where are you from? What school grade at you in? None of the answers will be remembered of course. And then someone – a brave soul – will pipe up at last about a certain country’s politics or something in the news. Where there’s diversity there’s disagreement and well, the rest is history.
- Really awkward silence for an inconceivably long period of time. Silence, like an avalanche or really uncomfortable leather shoes, cannot be broken into or overcome with ease. Once the door is shut, the first person to pipe up will be met with judging stares and one word answers in 90% of cases. In fact, the time until a person speaks is directly proportional to the awkwardness of the response in the room. A broad generalisation you could say, but this could be classed as characteristic behaviour for people you have never met before.
“The generation now alive is perhaps the most important generation of humans ever to walk the earth” – Michio Kaku 2005
The fine lady who works at my local barbers and cut my hair the shortest its been in years once looked me straight in the eye and said, with a rich accent: “You’re intelligent you know, you’re gonna go far in life. Kids your age can be so immature and reckless but not you.”
It was a fleeting comment, made on the assumption that if I could answer the phone by myself to remind the salon that I was coming in for my appointment, if I could get there on time AND remember my please’s and my thank you’s then somehow I was a mature sensible human being, the image of politeness that is expected of all young people. Although it happened months ago, this scenario came to mind again at the conference, where the incredible diversity of opinion and character blew my mind. The standard notion is that people my age should be seen and not heard. We are at the stage where we are labelled as rascals. There is essentially tick box criteria for what constitutes a “good” teenager and a “bad” teenager. But no matter which one you get classed as, you are to be ignored anyway because you have no opinions of your own.
For the majority of my life thus far I have always sought to disprove this image. Why can’t a person be both reckless and driven? Why can’t I be both passive and opinionated and why can’t we make mistakes which don’t define our hopes, dreams and passions? This conference, I thought, could change that. I could finally put the crown of truth on the head of all the perceptions of my friends and acquaintances that had accumulated over the years. Back home, I had always thought that my generation is so terribly.. unwoke (sic [slang]). I have been incredibly lucky to have moved to a global city and thus to have been raised surrounded by the abundance of information and knowledge of western culture and society. I thought naively that perhaps I would be able to see a pioneer at each corner, that everyone was at all times educating themselves on global issues and breakthroughs. But when my school introduced a specialised course which, a bit like a carousel, taught us about real-time world issues classified into humanities, I clocked that perhaps this wasn’t the case. In no other school in the country, private or state, was there any requirement, let alone course, to teach young people about the world today. In the age of the internet, I realised that perhaps the immense responsibility of educating ourselves to be citizens of today rests with us and only us.
Going back to the “unwoke” thing, when I left London to make my way to the conference, that was the prejudice I held of my generation, that in the age the internet and unless through force, only the very few bothered to research and take interest in global affairs. After the second keynote speaker was done – a middle-aged, light-hearted professor educated in medicine, philosophy and psychology who seemed to hate the internet – we split into smaller groups to discuss the speech and what we individually reaped from it. Remember when I talked earlier about the two possible scenarios when locked in a room full of people you have never met before? Well what happened next was definitely the latter. When asked individually what each one thought of the speaker and the ideas presented in the keynote, a member of the “crew” (the group of students from the host school participating in the conference) was given the following responses:
“I don’t know”
“I was asleep half the time”
“It was too long”
“I can’t remember”
Could it have been just shyness? A need to break the ice a little? There is no question that unknown territory sometimes overcomes opinion and debate. It was a little more than disappointing nonetheless, and although usually would have passed me by, somehow struck a chord for me. Perhaps the subject of the keynote was utterly confusing or extremely boring, but I refused to believe that somehow it was of no interest to any of the youth in the room (this of course, although being the majority, did not encompass everyone. I made some excellent friends in my discussion group who either shared or disagreed with my own opinions of the keynote talks). We ended up playing musical chairs, by the way.
11:34AM
There are numerous factors which I believe contribute to the efficiency of a group discussion. No discussion or meeting can ever operate at 100% efficiency because there are factors such as tiredness, shyness, boredom and distraction which limit group contribution. Right there in the moment, in the room in the conversation I believe it is impossible to unleash the entire potential of a person’s contribution, hence why it was so, to put it bluntly, dead. We were all fortunate young people, all receiving a world-class education in some of the world’s best international schools. However we were not great debaters or entrepreneurs or teachers, we were young people trying to figure themselves out. Each person in the room came to the conference for a different reason. Some made it clear that they were there for a chat with their mates, some raised their voices, others preferred to listen.
However things changed towards the end, we had three other keynote speakers: a female muslim journalist who got “kidnapped” and taken to a barbecue by the head of a terrorist group, a famed and inspiring polar explorer, and a Syrian citizen who got kidnapped by not only the Free Syrian Army but also Assad’s militants. The conversations turned lively, and I refuse to believe that it was because there was an adult in the room that time. We discussed everything from the strategies of the United Nations concerning the middle east, to how inspired we all were by such stories where humanity is pushed to physical and psychological limits.
Looking back now, no longer in the bubble far from home, I am so happy that I met so many young people just like me. I am so fortunate to say that as of now I have friends on every continent on earth (except Antarctica), There is something so incredibly special about spending a full week away from home in a different country in order to make friends out of complete strangers. It’s not unlike moving to a completely different country with only a suitcase to your name, however it is not entirely similar. A week is a long enough period of time to craft fabulous friendships yet is painfully short enough to make you value them more and more the closer you are to the end of your trip. A week is short enough to make you realise how much you value this delicate human connection that has been grafted out of nothing over the past week. It makes you appreciate every single moment you spend with these incredible new people and, as it did for me, makes you wondrously sad the moment you get home. Of course in the age of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram you can never really part from these new connections, and I know that for me a good portion of the second half of the week was spent running around scanning people’s snapchat codes and typing my name into their Facebook search bars and pressing “add friend”. But even the internet cannot replace the tearful laughs and parting sorrow which I experienced over the course of the week. Touching down in London, when all of my newfound Columbian, Australian and South African friends were still in transit brings with it an uncomfortable loneliness, as does suddenly waking up in your own home without the blaring of the an alarm in the bunk below you.
I have come away from this conference inspired and thinking the world is a whole lot smaller. It has made me wish for more conferences like this. There needs to be a better way for young people from all over the world to meet face to face and discuss global affairs. If we are indeed the most important generation to have ever walked the earth, then surely we will find strength in numbers and where there is debate and discussion, there will be change, progress and enlightenment.
This has been over 2000 words (apologies, for they have been fairly colloquial and soppy at times) on my inner thoughts about newfound human connection and other conference-related things. A lot of things not mentioned here are those which I cannot just yet formulate words and sentences for, but hopefully with future posts I will get better at this. If you’re still reading, big thanks and hopefully me answering my own questions on a blog post was somewhat satisfactory.
See you in the next one.
7:36AM
paradox 
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