It has been an ‘interesting week’, a week which required a ‘long weekend’ to recover, but here I am, ready to reflect on my ‘school camp’ experience.
I discovered that school camps are a place where creativity, flexibility and bravery are the by-products of deprivation, challenge and communal living. In this way, school camp offers students (and their teachers) an alternate reality. We are wrenched from our parental and technological cocoon and placed in an alien world where the cold wind reaches its icy fingers into the deepest recesses of a person’s being – in both a literal and a figurative sense.
It is obvious that ‘school camps’ offer individuals the opportunity to learn about aspects of themselves they did not know existed. At ‘camp’ students may be pushed to their limits and encouraged to consider alternate approaches to day to day tasks. They learn about their own emotional responses to external situations and they begin to appreciate exactly what they can achieve when they need to achieve it. They learn about teamwork, the characteristics of a leader and, that even though they each have the capacity to lead, some may feel more comfortable in the role than others. Similarly they begin to appreciate that management and teamwork require different levels of cooperation and effective communication. In short, they learn a little bit more about themselves, their motivations and their fears. Yet this is not the benefit I derived most from my week in the wilderness.
After a few days in the bush I learnt that I am not as young, and certainly not as fit, as I used to be. With this realisation came the reminder that even though we may see the same event, hear the same story, or experience the same situation, chances are our interpretations will be widely variant. Similarly, although I may not be able to say I enjoyed my school camp experience, I can certainly say that I cherished it. It is here that I begin to illuminate the heart of my school camp experience. It is here, within the thought processes of these two observations that I find solace. We all have within us the ability to consider a situation from an alternate perspective and discover the beauty within adversity. One word to describe this experience is tolerance, however I prefer to broaden the concept to AWARENESS. This is how we come to our own understanding of ourself and our place within a wider system.
School camp reminded me to treasure experiences that were not delightful because they teach us what it is to live a sensational life.
