Chris Hadfield credits independent schools for enabling potential in children
Special to The B.C. Catholic
To reach your potential, you must see opportunities that exist, said Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Enabling that vision for students, he said, is what the independent schools of B.C. do well.
Speaking to more than 5,000 at the 50th Anniversary Convention of the Federation of Independent School Associations (FISA), Hadfield said most of us build walls around our expectations, absorbing what we see and assuming we can’t do more.
“Almost everything that you decided not to do in life nobody ever told you that you couldn’t.”
Hadfield credited FISA, which includes the Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese (CISVA), for seeking to create an environment from which each child emerges with as much sustained and enabled potential as possible.
“We let so many things in our life … be dictated by fear,” said Hadfield. “The opposite of fear is education.”
Hadfield certainly understands fear, having ridden what he calls a “4.5-million-pound bomb” into space. On takeoff, his odds of dying were one in 38, the same as they would be for an average traveller if 21 airliners crashed each day.
Why take that risk? Because, he said, change in life is inevitable; for an astronaut, the most dramatic change occurs the day of leaving the earth.
How do you get ready for change? Start with education, he said, another word for competence. Build a steadily increasing bedrock of competence so that when change comes you’re not relying on luck or instinct. Instead, you have fundamentally changed who you are; your gut instinct has evolved and you’re ready to deal with reality.
Whether change is frightening or just part of life is a reflection of how you deal with things. Ask yourself, he said, what you will be doing in 15 years if life goes perfectly, if the things that keep you busy every day actually work out.
“Give yourself one real gift,” he suggested. “Define your own vision of perfection.” It needn’t be realistic. His goal, set as a 9-year-old after watching the first lunar landing, was to walk on the moon by age 45.
“On the morning of July 20, 1969, it was impossible to walk on the moon. It wasn’t hard; it was impossible. And yet by bedtime on July 20, 1969, Neil and Buzz were running around on the moon.”
“That was just like someone giving me permission and saying, ‘Impossible things happen as the result of a huge amount of work and having a vision, a definition of perfection.'”
The beauty of having an “impossible” goal, said Hadfield, is the focus it sets for immediate choices.
“A long-term goal is the easy part. The actual definition of your life is the sequence of things that you choose to do next.” A clear understanding of where you want your life to go makes immediate choices easier: what will I do with the next weekend, day, hour?
Four years before lift-off, Commander Hadfield asked his crew to define goals for their mission. First, understandably, was get home alive, and second, bring back the spaceship. But behind those, he said, lay another objective: enjoy it enough to want to do it again. “We had to love what we were doing.”
It’s okay to have a big motive, said Hadfield, but don’t wait for the future to enjoy life. Recognize that what you do next is your life and deliberately enjoy it. Let yourself succeed daily, celebrating as victories the smallest good things that happen to you.
“Personally, I have an extremely low threshold of victory. I allow myself to be victorious every day.”
Hadfield said looking down while the International Space Station circled the earth 2,650 times irreversibly deepened his perspective and respect for our planet and people.
The space station “is an amazing human construct, impossible: 15 nations that are almost always at war with each other, or at least bristling with anger: Russia, Japan, Europe, the United States, Canada, all somehow recognizing that if you give yourself an impossible goal, then you can rise above the day-to-day and you can make good decisions. You recognize that some things are more important.”
Hadfield said he believes it’s necessary to share life’s unbelievably beautiful experiences, like the sunrises he saw every 92 minutes. The most meaningful way to do that turned out to be leading 700,000 children around the world in song.
