Why Apollo?

It’s been a hot minute, gentle reader, three months to be precise.

What’s the story morning glory?

What’s happenin’ captain?

What’s the word hummingbird?

This blog has been a public repository for my thoughts and musings on everything interesting (and not) going on in my life over the last few years.

From the magic to the mundane, the tragic to the ecstatic, I have chirped away about work, play, love, loss, travel, family, fate, finance, philosophy, boxing, volunteering - all sorts.

Something I am yet to write about is starting and running my own business.

A new hat I started wearing last year is that of the ‘entrepreneur’.

Had you said to me a couple of years ago I would be sporting such a hat, I doubt I would have believed you. I don’t really wear hats.

Yet here I am, a ‘Founder’ and ‘Director’ of a social enterprise (a company incorporated for a social purpose, to address social issues).

Cohering my thoughts and feelings about life into words - both handwritten onto a page and rattled out onto a laptop - matters to me, odd as it may sound.

Humans need to express themselves, be that by way of forcefully exhaling breath into the mouth of a musical instrument, fingering a wet lump of clay rotating on a potters wheel, or choreographically gyrating to the sound of a hand beating a goatskin drum.

Horses for courses.

My mode of creative expression - my ‘thing’, the medium through which I can express and communicate what is unique about me and the human condition - is the written word.

Decidedly unsexy next to playing an instrument or dancing, perhaps, but we move.

So why have I not written about Apollo yet?

A couple of reasons.

Outside of sessions with young people - yay - and meetings with adults - yawn - I have to write session recordings and reports and emails and all else.

Come evening, my want to sit down and write some more has waned (my recent introduction to the brilliant mind-bending psycho-moral saga that is Breaking Bad has nothing to do with it, okay).

Partly it’s due to my irreducible imposter syndrome. 'Who am I to write about business, as if I know a damn thing?'

And, in no small part, because I didn’t know where to start.

Apollo will soon celebrate its first anniversary - one full year in business.?

Approaching an anniversary seems as good a time as any to start writing something - anything! - about business, in general and mine specifically.

And I will start from the tippy-top, in a good ole fashioned ramble.

Strap in.

We start, I said, from the top: the apex, the alpha, the A, the name of the thing.

The company’s name is Apollo Developments Ltd.

“Sounds like a building company”, said one of my friends.

It does indeed, and not by mistake.

Incorporating a company, you cannot just give it a name - ‘Apollo Ltd’ would be rejected by the registrar.

Usually there would be another word indicating the type of business carried on by the company, like ‘Apollo Printers Ltd’, ‘Apollo Dog Walkers Ltd’, ‘Apollo Private Equity Holdings (Upper South East Asia) Ltd’, and so on.

Another Liam Doherty owns another company in Guernsey, called Aran Developments Limited.

The way my old man has conducted his business as a building subcontractor has been been exemplary - generally, but particularly to me as a founder.

There are many things I am trying to emulate in my ‘developments’ of young people, which I shan't bore you with or embarrass the old man with, but a few of the headlines are:

- Build faster and better, finish the job quicker and to a higher standard than competitors

- Attraction not promotion, focus on the work first and the rest will follow

- Back yourself and learn your lessons on the way

- Find good men, pay them well

Apollo is a very different company, but many of the same principles apply, as does the word ‘developments' - only they are of young people rather than buildings.

Most of the young people referred to Apollo have suffered developmental trauma, which negatively impacts outcomes in later life - they are far more likely to cause harm to themselves, to their family, and society at large.

It is of critical importance that there are positive interventions in the lives of these young people, and that this is done ‘faster and better’, with a proactivity and level of care and consistency that is becoming increasingly absent in our established services.

If not built properly, they pose a risk to themselves and those around them.

Or, in the immortal words of self-emancipated slave Frederick Douglass, and Apollo's adopted raison d'etre: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair weak men.”

So, that’s the ‘Developments’ aspect.

Now, to ‘Apollo.’

There is a motif played out throughout Greco-Roman mythology, most popularly explicated by Nietzsche, of an oppositional yin-yang dance between Apollo and Dionysus.

Apollo is a sun-god, god of light, a god of clarity, of reason.

Apollo is a warrior, an archer to be precise - and precise he is. Apollo has clear purpose, his aim is true.

Dionysus, by stark contrast, is a dark and murky god, wine-sodden and hermaphroditic, overwhelming but alluring. Wild, unknowable.

Apollo is god of order, Dionysus god of chaos.

Apollo is culture, routine and security, Dionysus is nature, brute instinct, survival of the fittest.

Apollo is integration and coherence, Dionysus dissolution and intoxication.

Apollo is god of light and sight, clarity of purpose, aiming in a definite direction.

Dionysus is oceanic depth, all-enveloping, inviting you to sink into oblivion.

As I mentioned before, there is a yin-yang interplay here; one god is not right and the other wrong, one good and the other bad - it is context dependent.

The context in which I name my company Apollo is the Dionysian state in which our young people find themselves: in chaos, chronic uncertainty, and with inconsistent support.?Feed all of this into pubescent hormonal upheaval, the result is listless, nihilistic and destructive teenagers.

It is wholly feasible - indeed, something I notice with some young people I work with in my pastoral support role at a private college - that a touch of the Dionysian, some spontaneity and chaos, a break from established order, might be of benefit.

Generally, the kids Apollo supports have more than enough of the Dionysian, and are craving the clear boundaries, routine and consistency that many of the college students are blessed to have.

The word 'sin' is derived from an Ancient Greek archery term, havatia, which means literally 'to miss the mark'.

These kids need help aiming in a better direction.

And that, dear reader, is why the company is named Apollo.

And because Apollo is my middle name.