Principal's Report

As someone has said, the trouble with a kitten is that it eventually grows into a cat! With age our beautiful kitten loses its charm, its playfulness, its somersaults, its curiosity, its innocence. Poor old tabby… She just sleeps her life away.  She has forgotten how to play…

Too many people are like that.  They lose their creative spirit, their creative playfulness, that sense of fun which keeps creativity alive. 

Sometimes we think of creativity as a special talent possessed only on a few, but the reality is that all of us have a creative spirit and each of us has our own individual expression of it.  As Anne Wilson Schaef comments:

We imbue our image of creative people with qualities that we could never have, and then require of them that they be eccentric and different from the ordinary if they are truly creative.  The truth is, creativity is everyday… To plant an oak, for example, we need only a shovel!

Sometimes we allow others to destroy our creative possibilities.  How often have we been put off doing something, or attempting something, or standing out against the crowd on an issue of importance, by the negativity or scorn of others?  How often have we weighed up the consequences and gone for the safety of crowd opinion rather than following the more lonely path along where creativity could lead us?

Sometimes we ourselves neglect our creative talents by letting our inner negativity, our self-doubt, perhaps even our laziness or cowardice veto our creative potential.  Many of us remain as life's permanent 'caterpillars', locked in our encasement, unwilling to emerge from the chrysalis and to fly off as the beautiful butterflies. 

Florence Nightingale is an interesting case study in this respect.  She once spent around six years in bed with various illnesses and was accused of being something of a hypochondriac.  She could easily have succumbed to habit of bemoaning her ill-fortune or dwelling on her woes.  But she also had the dream of making her mark in the world. 

Fortunately it was the creative dream that won the day and compelled her to overcome her more negative tendencies.  Off she went to the Crimean War, where as the celebrated 'Lady of the Lamp', her singular life surpassed all the more spectacular events such as the Charge of the Light Brigade.  The legacy of her creative force has been the development of modern nursing practices.

One of our MFG traits is to be deep thinkers who are curious and creative. This is because we as a community felt that it was important to develop a commitment to being creative all of our lives and to fostering this in our young people. Let’s remember to be like Florence Nightingale as we are faced with safe choices and instead take the creative, slightly risker paths and see where they takes us; in other words, nurture the kittens inside all of us.

Michelle Crofts

Principal