“Once you learn to read you will be forever free”.

I’m still in regular touch with Matt. His life has turned around incredibly. He had been homeless when I met him back in 2016. Couldn’t read, no job, separated from his children, touching a life of crime.

But that’s all changed completely.

Matt is now connected with his three children. He has work that fits inside school hours. He’s intentional about bettering his life and his children’s lives. And he’s determined to stay positive. His choices about doing all this are amazing. (I’ve been grabbing some leaves from his book for myself!)

In October 2021, Matty invited Rich and me to dinner to help him celebrate 500 days clean – off drugs. We went to his house for home-cooked roast lamb with his mum and kids. A great night of connection and a totally worthy reason to celebrate! We were honoured to be invited.

It happened that I bumped into him again about a month later. He told me that the next day would mark 18 months clean! I could see there are lots of ways to slice and dice the time to create new opportunities to tick off the milestones and keep celebrating the forward steps. We celebrated that one with his famous pasta bake.  

Then what do you know, in May 2022 he landed at another key date – two years clean! I foresee the roast dinners and the happily returned favours going on for years. And that’s a key point. Longevity of relationship and connection. They make a life! They make healthy lives.

But this time over dinner I noticed another incredible new difference in Matt. It was his language! And his reciprocity! So much of them! So conversational!

I had to set down my knife and fork and ask him “Matt, what’s going on with you? You’re different. You’re really talking differently and connecting differently.”

“I’ve been swimming in the cold Derwent every day” he told me.

Well, I have no comment to make about a causal arrow firing-off from cold swimming to language gains. But I have come to understand that this chilling (pun intended) activity may have general health benefits. But regardless of the cause (though I have some hunches and they are to do with safety, meaning, goals, friendship, connection, and self-determination) this clear headed, sharp thinking, humour generating, wisdom producing, man was all a-flow. Flowing with curiosity and interest, delight in sharing self-satisfaction, and filled to the brim with gratitude. For everyone. His mum, his kids, his ex, his magistrate, the ‘coppers’ who give him friendly shout-outs, his dinner buddies.   

Transformation before our eyes.

So we chatted on about everything.

Of course, because we had started talking about cold water swimming, the conversation wended on to beaches and then to tides. And then Matt said something that sent my thoughts wandering off on another tangent.

“Do you know, I’d go down to the beach every day, and sometimes the water was right up the beach, and sometimes it was right down. ‘What makes that happen?’ I asked myself. So, I looked it up. It’s the tides! I googled it. Did you know it’s the moon that does that! Who’d have thought it was the moon! But it is!”

Because Rich was there, they continued the chat together about tides and fishing and how to breathe before you get in the icy river. But I’d retreated into my thoughts.

Of course, Matt didn’t do year 10 physics class because he couldn’t read. And now he can. So now he knows that the moon causes the tides. He wondered how they happened and now he knows because he found out for himself by reading. Now he can independently follow this and every thread of curiosity that happens to appeal to him.

What incredible transformation of everything, because he can read. What freedom to choose.

Matt is smart. Especially at maths. He’d have breezed through the content of physics classes if he’d been able to decode the words back then. But now he can draw knowledge to himself and and make up for lost time. He wants to study. Uni for him. He knows he’s got the grunt to handle it. I’m pretty sure I’ll see this happen.

I’m not sure who the first person was to say that reading is freedom. It’s an understanding that has been around for a long time. (Long enough that we should really be at #100PercentLiteracy already.) I know Frederick Douglass, emancipated slave and slavery abolitionist, made this connection. He wrote:

             “Once you learn to read you will be forever free”.

 Matt knows this now too. He’s embodied it. Both the reading and the freedom.

The tides have turned.

Rosalie Martin, Founder Connect42

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