It’s the weekend!
3rd October 2025
I hope it’s been a positive week. There will have been challenges, naturally, but I also hope that there have been some really positive moments; be that within the classroom, lab or on the sports field; be that in a professional interaction with a colleague; a good and productive conversation with a friend. We all need that equilibrium. We need the good to balance those challenges. We need the work to balance the sport.
It’s not always clear, on an individual basis, what motivates us. Some of us will be more certain about what we desire; in life and work. Some of us will just ‘bumble along’. What I do hope, however you are wired up, is that your work can motivate you, itself. I cannot over-emphasise how important your work is. Whatever your role, whatever you do, whether you are at school or college, in the workplace or at home, you can make a difference, you do have an impact; to your friends, your family, our community.
That’s our ‘work’ and it is why we need our ‘sport’.
Our ‘sport’? By that I do not necessarily mean sitting watching the amazingly exciting and slightly nerve-jangling Ryder Cup, or the thrilling Red Roses World Cup win – although those events were brilliant, inspiring and uncomfortable – to some degree. Watching live sport may be your thing but it’s not necessarily the right definition of the word ‘sport’. My understanding might be more Shakespearean. To ‘sport’ might mean to do something different, something that could not be deemed to be work.
That’s where it all can become a little more challenging to understand. One person’s work (chore) might be another’s sport (pleasure). There are many colleagues I know who cook or bake for pleasure (sport), where others hate cooking and see it as a necessary burden (work). There will be colleagues who spend time this weekend renovating their house, e.g., painting a bedroom or fixing the coving (sport). There will be colleagues who’ll spend time this weekend reluctantly cutting the lawn for the last time this year (work).
The point, I think, is that we should all find out what our ‘sport’ might be. What it is that gives us that point of difference, that sense of fulfilment, that moment of relaxation. We all need that. And if we get that right, and it balances well with our work, it can make working that much more meaningful and enjoyable. We need those contrasts; the black and white, the points of difference.
I do hope that you will all be going into the weekend knowing that you have earned your sport. I do very much hope you will then be leaping out of bed on Monday morning knowing that you have purposeful, important and inspiring work.
A bit of reading and research suggest that this might be the paradox of pleasure; too much of a good thing, constant pleasure, brings pain.
As I had to learn for my O level English Literature (back in 1984) …
‘If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work, But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.’ William Shakespeare (Henry IV part one).
Have a weekend of ‘sport’. And remember the value of your ‘work’.