More than ever kindness is needed in the world
I am not normally someone who’s lost for words. The challenge each month for this article has been to take the first draft of everything I’ve screen-dumped onto my page and then whittle it down to just 500 words that capture what I really want to say.
This month, however, finding any appropriate words is a challenge. They say that a picture can convey a thousand words, let alone five hundred, but the picture in front of me now is my own reflection in a blank screen, a look of disbelief in my eyes, a slowly shaking head, and a softly spoken sigh escaping from my mouth.
What on earth has our world become?
Three years ago, I welcomed staff back to college after the summer break with a warning that the challenges we were about to face looked pretty much like a perfect storm.
With hindsight, I clearly didn’t know what I was talking about. The storms around us since then have perfected themselves in ways we could never have imagined.
Three weeks ago, we saw a new war begin in Europe, and unfortunately, none of us had any trouble imagining just how badly that could turn out for us all.
So what on earth has our world become?
The truth is, the world hasn’t changed into something completely new and unknown in the past few weeks. The destruction of war, the deadliness of conflicts, and the uprooting of whole populations into mass migration, hunger and homelessness have been a constant feature of the world we live in.
It just seems a lot closer to us now, and much more real.
The relative peace and freedom we all enjoy is hard won, and easily lost.
The pandemic has shown us that everything we take for granted, from meeting friends to food deliveries, can be disappear in an instant.
It has reminded us how fragile the certainties of life are, and how hard we should work to safeguard what we value.
As a college and university, we have committed that everything we do will be done in a spirit of collaboration, openness, respect, and excellence.
Easy values to say, less easy to live by, but really good ones to use to challenge ourselves and each other to do the right things, and in the right way.
One of our strategies during the pandemic was to hold consistently to a key message, a message to be kind: kind to ourselves, and kind to each other.
The first reaction of the Moray community to the news coming out of the Ukraine has been, as you would expect, a kind one. “What can we do to help?”
What we can do is frustratingly limited, but the power of kindness should never be under-estimated.
As a college community, we want to make sure that every student and member of staff, particularly those coming from areas of conflict, is made to feel welcome and safe at our college.
We also want to support staff and students contributing to humanitarian relief operations. And more than anything, we want to keep holding ourselves to account for the world we either help create, or have turned a blind eye to.
- David Patterson is the principal of Moray College UHI, based in Elgin.
