There’s a child’s crayon drawing hanging on the wall in my bedroom. A man and a boy run side by side. Their faces have no features. Under the image, it is written: “As my father taught me, I do not run too fast during a marathon so as not to exhaust myself. And it’s signed with Sonny’s first name.
It’s a sentence that somewhat sums up my philosophy of life. The one I wanted to instill in my boys. Life is not a sprint, but a marathon. You don’t start a marathon too quickly, you go at your own pace, otherwise you’ll run into a wall. It’s not just a metaphor. It is a physical reality.
I thought of this Sonny drawing while reading a column by Adam Gopnik in the New York Times last week. The text by Gopnik, who grew up and studied in Montreal – and who was recently seen playing his own role as an interviewer in the film Tar – is titled “What We Lose When We Push Our Kids To “Achieve””1.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MARC CASSIVI
It is by persisting with guitar chords, despite a limited musical talent, that the author says he understood what self-fulfillment was. Without anyone forcing him, he locked himself in his bedroom for hours as a teenager to learn Beatles songs. The harmonious sounds he ended up extracting from his instrument made him, he says, deeply happy.
“It seems appropriate, as the school year draws to a close and graduates mostly wonder what they will do with their lives, to talk about a distinction that I first perceived in this room and in these chord progressions, he writes. It’s the difference between accomplishment and success. »
Success, according to Gopnik, is the successful execution of a task imposed by others, while achievement is the result of a self-chosen activity. For him, it’s the guitar. For me, it’s running.
I had neither the patience nor the talent to learn to play the guitar. On the other hand, you don’t need any special talent to run. Nobody forced me to run alone, on a Sunday morning, 30 km under a blazing sun or freezing rain. I did it, not just to stick to my marathon training plan, but to fulfill myself.
I have never felt the benefits of self-fulfillment more intensely than at the finish line of my first marathon. I was at the end of my resources and on the verge of tears. Happy and proud of the efforts that I had multiplied in order to cover 42.2 km. Admittedly, I got there an hour and a half behind the winner of the race, but that didn’t matter to me.
The difference between accomplishment and success is the difference between measuring yourself and comparing yourself to others. However, society denigrates accomplishment in favor of success, believes Adam Gopnik.
This is the reason why we value the most prestigious secondary schools and the most limited university programs. Not so that young people can accomplish themselves, but so that they can “succeed in life”, according to criteria imposed on them by society (money, influence, power, recognition, etc.).
The school claims that it measures the progress of the students vis-à-vis themselves and that their improvement is established according to criteria which are personal to them. It ignores the fact that our entire education system is based on comparison. We live, whether we like it or not, in a culture of performance and competition, not with ourselves, but with others.
Young people are often the guinea pigs of this social experiment, which has experienced many failures for decades and which is increasingly manifested by performance anxiety, a widespread phenomenon in schools.
“We push these young people towards success, from task to task, in something that resembles less a frantic race than a maze, where they find themselves like rats rewarded at each turn with a dose of sugar water, the path to the center – or the meaning of it all – never being clearly explained,” writes Adam Gopnik.
Fiston completed his final CEGEP exam on Friday. Her brother will be graduating from high school in less than a month. What awaits them? Who knows ? I often remind them that they have the right to make mistakes, to change their minds, to take side roads, to retrace their steps. There’s no point in being in a hurry, I told Son again this week. You have all your time.