Where Are We Going?

(This is a copy of an assembly “talk” I gave to the school “Claremont Fan Court School” in Esher, Surrey, UK.  (1986 ) This was my last day of teaching at this school and for ever!  It was a kind of farewell speech!  It went down well, and I recently discovered that I have kept a copy, and I thought it might be fun for my friends to see it!)

 

            A man told his wife one day ‘I’d like to travel to some strange planet one day’ She reminded him that ‘You are already there!’

 

            Facts are stranger than fiction, sometimes.  Without you doing anything about it you are all travelling in SIX different ways at tremendous speeds, right now, whilst you are just sitting here listening to me.

 

            Firstly you are falling towards the centre of the Earth at the remarkable speed of 1cm every 100 years.  I.e. Britain is tilting so that its Eastern side is sinking into the North Sea.

           

            Secondly Britain is moving away from America at the rate of 1 inch per year!

 

            Thirdly the Earth is spinning like a top and our speed is roughly 500 Miles per hour (Even faster at the Equator, and ZERO at the Poles!)  This reminds me of the little boy who sat up all night wondering where the sun had gone. Eventually it dawned upon him!

 

            Fourthly we are orbiting the Sun once in 365 days at a speed of nearly 67,000 Miles per hour!

 

            Fifthly, our galaxy, The Milky Way which contains 250 Billion stars (suns), is spinning and as we are on the outer edge we are moving round at the astonishing speed of 374,000 Miles per hour.

 

            Last, but not least, the 100 odd Billion Galaxies are all moving away from each other, our estimated speed for this movement is about 200,000 miles per hour.   This mode of transport is best illustrated by demonstration.  (Here I blew up a balloon, marking some galaxies on the surface with a ballpoint pen, and watching the dots moving apart as the balloon increased in size.   I then let the balloon go and it whizzed off amongst the pupils LOL, - much laughter!)

 

            All this and you can do nothing about it.  We can do a lot about how we go about the surface, and I don’t mean just travel!

 

            Lord David Cecil once wrote:

     Life is a card game in which everyone is dealt a hand that he must accept.  His success will depend on his playing it as well as it can be played.  A large number of failures in life occur because people refuse to do this and instead insist on playing the hand they think they should have been dealt!

 

            A young woman was explaining to a friend why she had decided to marry one man rather than another.

    “When I was with John” She said “I thought he was the cleverest person in the world”.

    “Then Why didn’t you choose him?” the puzzled friend asked?

    “Because when I’m with Sam, I think I’m the cleverest person in the whole world”…………….

 

            Being a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) I was impressed by this news item from the Hindustani Times in Delhi.

     When two feuding Sikh factions lined up with swords in hand to fight it out, a social worker persuaded them to settle their differences peacefully.  BUT Sikh honour demanded that blood be spilled.  So each man donated a pint of blood to the blood bank.

 

            Statistics show that, in China, a child is born every 47 seconds, reported a T.V. commentator.  “Isn’t it wonderful” remarked a view to her husband “That they manage to space them so regular”!

 

            We do have to be so careful how we read and interpret information, even more so when translation across languages takes place.

            A German student, who was staying with a Glasgow family to help him improve his English, asked the meaning of the Biblical expression “Mary was great with Child”.  He understood the explanation given.  Half an hour later he returned looking very puzzled.  “What then” he queried, “does this statement mean ‘Mr Smith is great with Children’?”

 

            One of life’s major mistakes is being the last member in a family to go down with ‘flu’ - after all the sympathy has run out!

 

            “What are little girls made of?” one little boy had asked his parents.  “Sugar & Spice and all things nice, of course!”

            “Hmpf” came the reply “It’s obvious that YOU’VE never tried biting one!”

 

            George Bernard Shaw once wrote ~ “Life is not a brief candle.  It is a splendid torch that I want to burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

            I think it is important that everyone has the chance to light their candles, but some, many in fact, in the third world, have barely a spark.  We who have, must fuel their lives, so that they too can hold their torches high and be proud to be part of the World.   Quakers believe that “there is that of God in everyone”.  One of the main features of a Quaker Meeting for Worship is the silence.  Let us use these next few minutes, of silence, to gather one’s own thoughts, and to think and pray for the strength to help make this a better world.

 

Copyright Chris Phillips 1986