The trouble with some people is that they walk around as if they own the place. It’s true, but what is also true and less often said is that the trouble with some others is that they walk around as if they don’t. I’d like you to be one of those who do and also one of those who take that responsibility seriously, and the point of this assembly is to convince you that’s a good idea. So, this is how it is going to go – a roadmap if you will so that you can follow my train of thought, structure the notes you’re about to make in the little books you’ve brought for the purpose and ensure that you get as much as possible from the experience. I’m going to start with a piece of poetry that will either amuse or confuse – I’m not sure which. I’ll tell you a little about the poet just in case their work enchants you and move on to the idea of resilience from which we’ll loop to confidence and its counterpoint fear. I’ll quote from a philosophical tome, briefly reference a cultural icon and finally tie those ideas together by explaining why you should lean into this ill-fitting cliché.
First the poetry, pens at the ready: “Zamina-mina, he-he. Waka, waka, he-he”. Amusing or confusing? Maybe both. The poet I’m quoting is Shakira and her 2010 world cup theme song Waka Waka (this time for Africa). To an uneducated ear that line sounds like nonsense syllables, and pop music has a well-established history of using sha la la las and whoa whoa whoas so nonsense is not an inappropriate guess, but in this case it’s inaccurate. Shakira is quoting a Cameroonian band Golden Sounds and their 1986 song Zangalewa. These lyrics are in the Fang language – mostly spoken in Equatorial Guinea but also southern Cameroon and they mean something like “Come on – yeah! Do it – yeah!” Shakira isn’t Cameroonian, she’s a Columbian of Spanish and Lebanese descent and is best known for her Hispanophone influence on the music of Latin America and, in this country at least, for her 2001 album Laundry Service.
Some of the lyrics of Waka Waka are in Fang, some are in Spanish and some are in Zulu. Some, fortunately for me, are in English and the lines I want to share with you today are these: “The pressure's on, you feel it, but you got it all, believe it. When you fall get up, oh-oh. And if you fall get up, eh-eh.” Shakira is singing to football teams and, as a rugby player I can’t help feeling that the sport would be better if there was rather more getting up oh oh and less complaining from the players that they fell down eh eh. That rather ungenerous thought, though, is not my point. My point is that there are times in sixth form life when pressure is on – some of you might be feeling it now, for others it might be just round the corner. Doing your best is hard, making the most of your opportunities is a challenge – if you never feel any pressure then you’re not doing either so the question is not how you avoid that feeling but how you respond to it.
So, let me echo Shakira, quoting her words but expressing a view I believe in to the bottom of my heart. You got it all believe it. John Lennon, who for today’s purposes you can think of as the Shakira of 1967, says “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done,” which sounds vacuous – on one level it is, but the point is that you are not asked to do more than your best, not challenged to achieve more than your potential and not expected to take more opportunities than there are. What you can do is exactly what is asked of you and obviously, vacuously, that’s something that can be done.
There are going to be times when you fall down – in life just as in football. You’ll miss a deadline, plough a test, decide to watch Celebrity Traitors rather than doing your response properly and the challenge at that point is to get up oh oh, or possibly eh eh. It’s not comfortable – I vividly remember the first time that I fell down with Maths and it was my first term at University. I had sailed through school, putting correct answers down without getting in too much of a pickle (which was, no doubt, annoying for everyone around me – I’m retrospectively really sorry), but when I got to Oxford it suddenly got hard and I didn’t have the right tools. I was confident – some would say arrogant – but it was a brittle confidence: I was confident because I always had the right answer but now I didn’t and I crumbled a bit. You’ll be glad to know that a combination of friends, a hard-working tutor and good advice from my family got me through but for a while there I had definitely fallen down and since this was before 2010 (I know, imagine!) there was no Shakira to tell me to get up.
I got through that experience – and others like it, we don’t have time for the full list of the times Mr Handscombe made a pig’s ear of things, amusing as that assembly would be – and getting through the experience gave me a kind of confidence I didn’t have before, a kind of confidence I had no chance of developing when things were straightforward. I knew that I could fall down, and then get up. Mathematically I knew I could get stuck and then get unstuck. I was talking with a group of maths professors the other week and they said that this is exactly the issue they face with a lot of undergraduates: they are confident for as long as they have the answer but crumble when it gets hard – their confidence is brittle rather than resilient.
So, when you fall down you should get up oh, oh, but don’t just do that, think to yourself that you’re building resilient confidence, that this process of falling down and getting up eh, eh is not a bug, not something that’s gone wrong in your sixth form experience, but a feature – something that we’ve deliberately built in in order to prepare you for university and the challenges of the world beyond.
But falling down can be scary, particularly if you’re not used to it – perhaps that’s the difference between football and rugby players. You might be afraid of getting something wrong, of not coming top, of making a mistake and if you were you would be suffering from that unfortunate affliction of being human. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are, at present, no satisfactory remedies and you are just going to have to deal with it. There are two choices here – to live in that fear, avoid taking chances, putting yourself out there, taking your shots; or to face it, recognise that it’s scary and do it anyway, believing that if things go wrong and you fall down then Shakira will be there with the advice on what to do next.
For some words on fear we turn to that book of philosophy I mentioned earlier and I have, at this point, to confess something to you. After my last assembly I got some rather brutal feedback – it seems that whilst you enjoyed my Polonius it is felt by some that cultural references have more resonance when the audience has a chance of having come across them beforehand. I shall therefore be resolutely heading for popular culture this time and if that disappoints you then you’ll just have to email me with some feedback. The philosophical tome I will quote from is by Frank Herbert and it’s a science fiction adventure written in 1965 called Dune. I do recognise that this is before some of you were even born, but it was turned into a 2021 film starring Zendaya who I’ve selected ahead of Timothee Chalamet as a cultural icon partly because of how he spells his name, but mostly because Zendaya, like Shakira, uses her real first name as a mononym. Zendaya is a Californian with African-American, German and Scottish heritage. Her name comes from a Shona word meaning to give thanks. Shona isn’t spoken in Cameroon (or Equatorial Guinea for that matter) – it’s one of the languages of Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
In Frank Herbert’s book, and therefore also Zendaya’s film – an attribution that is definitely going to get me into trouble if the director is listening, so apologies to Denis Villeneuve, I can only recommend you adopt a snappier stage name – in the book and the film there are a group of women with witch-like abilities called the Bene Gesserit. The Bene Gesserit form a secret society with mysterious powers that they use to guide humanity to a better future and keep the plot moving. You should probably read the book, but the reason they are relevant to today’s assembly is that they have an incantation that they use to focus their minds in time of peril. When I was at school (some time between Frank Herbert and Zendaya) my wisest friends had it memorised for use in difficult moments. It goes like this:
I must not fear
Fear is the mind killer
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration
I will face my fear
I will permit it to pass over me and through me
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing
Only I will remain.
I don’t think you can avoid being afraid from time to time – certainly it’s not a trick I’ve mastered – but you can face your fear and take your opportunities anyway; you can’t avoid falling down but you can get up again and develop a resilient confidence. The kind of confidence that allows you, if you’ll pardon the expression, to walk around as if you own the place.
If that phrase grates a little it’s because it’s usually used to express arrogance rather than confidence – the ownership implied is that of a dictator treading on lesser mortals but the words could also refer to a host welcoming their guests. It is the latter image I wish to use. It takes confidence to make others welcome, it takes confidence to care about people and places, to look beyond your own troubles to those around you, to look beyond the here and now to making the future better. I want you to face your fears, to allow them to pass over and through you; I want you to pick yourselves up when you fall down and become resilient; and the reason I want you to do that is because I want you to guide humanity to a better future, not through Bene Gesserit powers of witchcraft and control but by being kind, picking up litter, leaving rooms and people nicer than you found them rather than more dishevelled and dilapidated.
So, in the words of the great poet, quoting those sages of times past “Zamina-mina, he-he. Waka, waka, he-he” – come on, yeah, do it. Yeah.
Footnotes
1. Shakira's music also inspired Try Everything.
2. Frank Herbert also has something to say about Endings.
3. The John Lennon quote comes from "All You Need is Love" which gets analysed for its time signature in I Got Rhythm
4. The idea of fear is explored in several other assemblies such as Not Fear but Love and Life, Death, Love