On Discipline (24 November 2003)

Almost a month ago, a group of Chinese acrobats came to Nassau and performed for Bahamian audiences. There were sixteen of them. Their average age was twelve; and they held their Bahamian audiences spellbound with their feats.

One night — the last night of the run, as is typical of performances in Nassau — the side of the Kendal G. L. Isaacs Gym towards which the acrobats were performing was filled to capacity; there was standing room only, unless we wanted to open up the performance and turn the stage around, and seat people on the opposite side of the gymnasium. The acrobats performed, earning their "oohs" and "aahs". They were not alone; two Bahamian martial arts schools performed as well. In each case the performers demonstrated a level of discipline that was both remarkable and admirable.

But the Bahamian audience did not.

To begin with, people arrived late. Not just a little late — five or ten minutes, the kind of late that can be excused by traffic or some other everyday occurrence — but very late, the kind of late that lecturers at COB mark "absent". The show started a little after seven (it was delayed by the number of people in the audience and by the fact that a lot of people were a little late); the real latecomers appeared between seven-thirty and eight o'clock.

To continue, people left early. Bahamian crowds have this apparent need to "beat the traffic". You see it on airplanes, at the movies, and worst of all, in live performance; large numbers of people stand before the end has quite arrived, in the hopes that they will be the first to the door, and therefore the first out the gate and onto the road. Their hopes are almost always vain, of course; only one person can be the first, and that honour generally goes to the person sitting near to the door. But apparently that fact hasn't killed the desire.

And to finish, people found it very difficult to sit in their seats. I'm not talking just about the parents of very young children who had to get up and take them to the bathroom. I'm talking about adults, teenagers, anyone who took it into their heads to stretch their legs during the excessively lengthy 70-minute performance. And every time people felt the urge to move around, they wandered between the invited guests (visiting dignitaries from China who had come to see their very own people perform) and the performance.

I was left uncomfortably aware of the discipline displayed by the twelve-year-old visiting Chinese acrobats, and the lack of discipline displayed by too many of us.

Now before anyone takes offence, let me say that I have been observing this phenomenon for a quite a long time. Most of the time it amuses me. You see, I am not one of those people who believe that it is physically impossible for a Bahamian to arrive anywhere, or to start anything on time; on the contrary, I believe that it is a matter of choice, a matter of planning. We choose to be indisciplined. We choose to be late.

If you doubt me on this, just attend any funeral. The number of people sitting in their seats a good hour or so before the service is slated to start is an excellent example of the fact that when we wish to arrive somewhere on time, we do so. And count the number of times the pastor or priest starts the church service late; the answer is almost never. School bells ring on time, and most teachers are in the schoolyard long before they have to be. Nurses and policemen and other people who work according to shifts are scrupulous timekeepers. Anyone who exercises early in the morning knows that Bahamians are not late risers; the bustle on the roads at dawn is evidence of that.

No; what I witnessed in the gym a month ago is not a failure of anything but a strong sense of self, an inability to recognize that just because one feels a certain way, one doesn't have to give in to that feeling. Just because one wants to get up and walk around during a performance it doesn't mean that one has to do so; one can use the bathroom before one absolutely has to, just as they taught us in school; one can plan ahead and get where one is going on time. All it takes is a little discipline.

You see, discipline is the practice of training our bodies to do what our minds tell them to do, rather than allowing our minds to be led by our bodies. The fact that we have all too often failed to do this is evidenced by the fact that when we Bahamians express our opinions, we normally do so by saying "I feel" rather than "I think" — a sure sign that we are led by our emotions and not our brains. Those of us who work at being Christians know that we can train ourselves to control our feelings with thought and prayer and practice. Anthropologically speaking, there is virtually nothing that we cannot control with our minds, a few major physical limitations aside (such as the fact that if we jump off a bridge we will fall, not fly). Theologically speaking, with God all things are possible.

The acrobats who visited the Bahamas from China were living proof that human beings, no matter how young, can train themselves and their bodies to behave in ways that are not normally possible. A twelve-year old can train himself to balance on a board placed on four cylinders stacked on a desk. Showing respect for performers and other audience members by remaining in our seats, keeping our mouths shut and our phones turned off, and ensuring that we get to functions on time seems small potatoes to me.

Of course, the respect must go both ways. Indiscipline breeds indiscipline; there is no good reason why a person should get to a performance on time if the performers themselves are going to start the show half an hour late. It's so common, in fact, for functions to begin late that during the run of The Landlord, people routinely arrived at 8:45 and 9:00 for a play whose lights went up at 8:30. One of these people, a woman, was shocked and insulted when she was told she was late at 8:50 p.m.

"The show start eight thirty, right?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," said the front-of-house attendant, "and it's almost nine."

She swelled with outrage. "But what yall doing starting on time?"

It's all a matter of discipline.