Open to question

THE whirl of several new schools. Stories swirling of teachers and principals; attitudes, peculiarities, dogmas, weaknesses.

But I'm trying to shield the kids from all that, as much as I can, don't want them closed off before they embark upon their bold new experiences; don't want any ugly hardenings into narrowness and judgment. The tuning fork is the American writer George Saunders: "Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die." Oh yes. Big, blazing openness, cracking apart our lives to so much.

A great sadness of our great religions: that their most publicly fervent supporters are often the fundamentalists hijacking a life-affirming sense of openness. Often these people are going against the very tenets of the religion itself in a blinded fear of "the other", tenets of tolerance, forgiveness, compassion. Those who are the most angry, unbending and belligerent often seem the least open; and they now have the shouty forums of the blogosphere and talkback radio to fuel their sense of righteousness. Do we want our own children - with their natural sense of openness - to calcify into this? Wisdom flourishes by withholding judgment. Judgment is the enemy of openness. Judgment is learnt.

My son's just started high school, a proud institution that banners its welcoming of all faiths and none. Yet on the first day he brought home the handout from its matriculation assembly with several prayers attached. Odd, I thought, after all the hip talk of inclusiveness to parents. Then I took the time to actually read the beautiful cadences of the text, so foreign to many kids of today: " ... grant that we may seek not so much to be understood as to understand". A universal rallying cry for openness if ever there was one. It's about tolerance. Empathy. Imagining yourself in another's shoes and becoming richer, humbler and wiser because of it. Surely a heightened sense of openness signals emotional maturity; its opposite, a dimming of awareness.

Saunders ruminates on how interesting it would be if we could permanently retain the heightened sense of awareness and openness we often acquire fleetingly in proximity to death. I've felt it at times. That sense of being so fiercely, vividly aligned with life; utterly open to the world's wonder and beauty and complexity; wanting to gulp experience, seize it all, not waste a moment of the extraordinariness. All the petty irritations and angers drop away; you feel cleansed, almost guiltily, despite your grief. But then that glary, knife-edge awareness leaks away and normalcy takes over. Would we be better if we could retain that hyper-receptiveness to life, in all its astonishing variety?

Openness is aligned with uncertainty.

It's OK to say you don't know, you're unsure; perhaps preferable. Deeply human and honest. The great writer W.G. Sebald was profoundly engaged with the idea of uncertainty in his later works; as he aged there was a brisk restlessness with certainty, particularly of the narratorial kind. "I think that fiction writing, which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself, is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing, where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable."

Openness is also aligned with that flint of a word, curiosity, and I used to think that people without curiosity were as disquieting as houses without books. Great things are achieved from a rangy impulse to question. It's about not being afraid to be vulnerable, humble, honest with yourself. Openness is a discipline and a tonic. A state of grace. Do we want our kids closed off from that?