It happened towards the end of secondary school. Sunlight was cutting through the classroom, and it must have been close to lunchtime because the air was caramel-thick with boredom. This was in the queasy final weeks before the Leaving Cert, the state exams every Irish teenager has to sit if they want to go to university.
We were a bunch of young lads, all acne and adrenaline, who had spent the previous summer passing through thresholds like hands through water: first loves, first time getting drunk, all that feverish giddy hormonal magic.
But with the Leaving Cert, the coordinates of our lives had been redrawn. I don’t think we’d ever felt more unhappily embedded in the faceless machinery of education. Our sole objective for an entire year had been to memorise as much information as possible, in order to regurgitate it in one exam after another. Our teacher’s sole objective was to drill all that information and rote learning into us.
And it was just another day of that, when it happened. I don’t know why, but the teacher suddenly broke off what he was saying and considered us for a moment. A movement like a camera shutter happened behind his eyes. His gaze changed. He leaned against his desk, folded his arms, and then he went off script.
He spoke about how we were going to leave school soon, and head into the world, separately, for ever. He said we wouldn’t be able to grasp it yet, but our horizons were about to expand in ways we wouldn’t believe. I know it sounds cheesy – it probably was cheesy – but for the teenage me it was a revelation to hear an adult address us like this, not as kids to whom he needed to impart information, but as humans with whom he wanted to share something like wisdom.
What stayed with me was the image he used: he said our awareness would be like a flame in a dark cave. The brighter and larger the flame grew, the more of the cave we would see. But with every bit of illumination, there would come a growing awareness of the vastness of the cave, of just how little of it we were actually seeing, and of how much more space and opportunity was left for our flame to grow.
According to him, if we were living right, we’d keep growing brighter and more curious as time went by, always seeing more, but with the expanding humility of knowing that insight can’t be exhausted; that life isn’t about reaching firm conclusions anyway, but about opening yourself to the possibility that you might be wrong, that there’s always more to learn.
Our culture tends to fetishise youthful naivety, to pretend that life’s a linear movement from the open innocence of youth to jaded experience. But much of my adult life has been the very opposite: it’s been about being disabused of my own prejudices; my failures of empathy and imagination; pushing against the seductions of certainty and staying true to that idea of the flame in the cave.
It’s a lesson I repeatedly fall short of – almost every time I’ve done something wrong in my life, really hurt someone, said or done the worst thing – it’s been because in that moment I was oblivious to what was beyond my own narrow powers of sight. Every blundering stumble has – in ways often as painful as beautiful – been a feeding of that flame.
So much of our lives today are lived within parameters designed to further entrench us in perpectives we already have. My teacher’s advice has been a sort of symbolic compass point warning me against the dangers of my own incuriosity. His words remind me to remain open to that which might further illuminate a darkness I don’t even realise I can’t see.
Not every life-changing moment is an earth-shattering “things were never the same” scenario. The words of my teacher formed a subtler threshold, a speech that passed by quietly in a sunlit classroom, but it kicked open a door in my mind, a door through which much of my subsequent life has flowed.
Kala by Colin Walsh (Atlantic Books, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
