The most basic need: safety

There’s one way you can tell that you’re the very first of the early runners to jog the paths of the nearby water meadows of a morning: it is that you’re the one breaching the spider web threads spanning from one side to the other, gathering across your face like so many Lilliputian ropes cast around Gulliver. Though these threads do not, of themselves, threaten your safety, they can be jolly irritating – even agitating. Certainly, they can distract you from the clearer danger of a large stone underfoot on which you could twist an ankle…

One’s sense of safety (emotional and physical) was a theme for reflection in Week 3 of term. I encouraged the boys to identify things which can impact it negatively, from the repeatedly agitating equivalent of spider threads to the single significant threat of a large stone. There were some very well-expressed ideas from within the context of school life, and we discussed how individually and collectively we can build up or erode someone’s feeling of safety. Self-reflection is at the root of empathy, after all.

This was in the first of a series of assemblies I am gradually making my way through on a relatively recent reinterpretation of the well-familiar ‘hierarchy of needs’ developed by the psychologist Maslow. This newer iteration, from the current-day psychologist Scott Kaufman, does away with the traditional pyramid representation as too ‘static’, something that suggests it needs to be climbed, scaled, conquered. He favours the visual representation of a yacht, where safety, then connection, then self-esteem combine to form the hull. The yacht is a more dynamic image, where the ‘self’ it represents journeys across the ocean of life; sometimes glass-calm, sometimes toweringly rough. The hull must be secure, stable and strong for the journey to be possible. (More of the ‘sail’ in weeks to come…) Actions that compromise the sense of safety – thoughtlessly or otherwise – therefore compromise the ability to stay afloat.

So it was that the boys were encouraged to reflect on how critical it is that our actions are always attuned to helping others feel safe in who they are; that this is a primary responsibility to one another and the base on which the hull of the good ship Pilgrims’ is constructed.