There is no grand victory waiting at the end of these pages. Retirement has not transformed me into a serene man gazing contentedly across the water, and writing has not emptied every cupboard where the old feelings were stored. What has changed is that I can now recognise the bargain I kept making. I would reduce myself in exchange for belonging, usefulness or peace, even when the peace was temporary and the belonging depended on never presenting the whole person.
Dumbing It Down
DUMBING IT DOWN – Prologue – The Call from Mensa
For most of my life, I have not been trying to prove that I was clever. I have been trying to avoid the consequences of being seen as too clever in the wrong setting, which is a different and lonelier thing. That distinction matters because it keeps the story away from the comfortable lie that I was always right and everyone else was always slow. I was not always right, and even when I was, I was not always effective, patient, kind, fair or easy to hear. The conflict was never only between my mind and other people; it was also between the speed of the thought and the flawed human being trying to carry it without doing too much damage.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 1 – Out of Voice Reach
Out there, beyond voice reach, my mind began gathering input from whatever it could find. It did not yet know it would later collide with classrooms, offices, clients, committees, family expectations, retirement, depression and the strange brick walls people build out of pride, fear and habit. It did not yet know that the forts in rocky outcrops and the secret places amongst bales of wool were early versions of a habit I would carry for decades, standing in the open while part of me had already withdrawn to a safer place. It only knew the paddocks were wide, help was distant, and authority lived close by in the form of parents who knew more, decided more, and carried the final word with the calm certainty of people who had earned it. That was enough for the child, because childhood does not require a theory before it begins building the adult.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 2 – The Comfort of Rote Learning
The brick wall was not obvious yet. In primary school, the wall looked more like a blackboard, and the blackboard could be mastered if you paid attention. I could stand in front of it, sit beneath it, copy from it and send back what it had already given me, and for the most part the wall did not hurt. If anything, it reassured me, because it gave the appearance of a world where effort and answer still belonged in the same sentence.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 3 – Dragged on by the Year Above
Secondary school would blow much of it apart, though of course I did not know that while I was still inside the smaller room. The neatness would not survive the larger rooms, the louder boys, the illness, the buses, the hierarchy, the social calculations, the wider world and the discovery that remembering the answer was not the same as knowing what to do with a mind that kept running ahead. The primary school version of me had learned the rules well enough to look successful. The secondary school version would begin to discover that success inside one room can leave you strangely unprepared for the next.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 4 – The First Cost of Standing Out
Years later, from the edge of retirement, I can see that child more clearly than he could see himself. I can forgive him his anger because it was not really about the flag, even though the flag gave the anger something visible to hold. It was about the first real blow to the idea of unmitigated potential, the first time he understood that being capable did not guarantee the world would let capability remain whole. It was also about the first faint recognition that the mind might have to be reduced, not because it was wrong, but because the room had limited space for it.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 5 – Three Months Behind
By the end of that first term, I was no longer the child who had simply supplied what was wanted in primary school. I had not become someone else yet, and I certainly had not become comfortable, but the old method had begun to crack. Rote learning had made me a reliable little beast in a small paddock, rewarded for remembering the right gate and trotting through it when asked. High school had opened the gate, shifted the fences, multiplied the handlers, and expected me to trot out with confidence as if I had been bred for the show ring.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 6 – Richard Jones and the Dull Roar
The wider world was never going to sit quietly while I arranged my thoughts. It was going to interrupt, misunderstand, challenge, ignore and occasionally prove me wrong, and if I wanted to think in that world I had to learn to think through noise. That does not mean I enjoyed it, because there is a difference between being formed by something and being grateful for every minute of it. I was not walking out of Richard Jones’ lessons glowing with intellectual awakening, ready to thank him for unsettling the tidy shelves in my head, and I was more likely irritated, watchful, slightly affronted and privately trying to work out why the old methods no longer seemed sufficient.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 7 – The Approved Kind of Ability
It showed me how to hide in plain sight, not by disappearing but by becoming visible in a form other people approved of. That skill would prove useful later, far beyond school ovals and paddocks, in offices, client meetings, committees, family rooms and professional partnerships. I would learn again and again to present the part that could be used while quietly managing the parts that might alarm, annoy or exhaust the room. I would become the helpful one, the practical one, the one who could see the numbers, read the pattern, fix the mess and translate the chaos into something manageable.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 8 – Clever, But Don’t Make a Thing of It
Be clever, but do not make a thing of it was the lesson, though nobody wrote it on the board. Bring the answer, but let someone else think they opened the door, because the doorway matters less than the feeling people have when they walk through it. See the wall, but mention it gently, and perhaps not until everyone else has finished admiring the speed at which we are approaching it. There is dry humour in that now, but there was also a terrible practicality, because survival often depends on knowing how much truth the room can bear before it turns on the person carrying it.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 9 – The Economics Essays
It gave me a glimpse of an avenue I had not been seeking, and it suggested that the mind I kept reducing for the room might have uses beyond survival. That is not a neat victory, and it certainly was not a clean one. It was messy, embarrassing, unfair, faintly comic and oddly instructive, which is to say it was probably a fairly accurate preparation for the rest of my working life. The lesson did not arrive as encouragement, but as a bruise with information inside it, and I have had enough of those over the years to know they can still be useful once the swelling goes down.
DUMBING IT DOWN – Chapter 10 – The Exam I Wasn’t Studying For
Looking back from this edge of full-time retirement, I can see Mr Saunders’ office more generously than I could then. I can see a teacher confronted with a student who had unsettled the neat distribution of expected ability and trying, in his way, to respond. I can see that the exam request may have been an attempt to move me from suspicion to opportunity, from informal influence to formal recognition. I can even see that the offer I declined may have been one of the few moments when the room tried, however clumsily, to acknowledge that I did not fit neatly where it had put me.