There are a lot of things about Cameron that, looking back now, really shouldn’t have felt like ordinary moments at the time.

But they did.

That’s one of the most interesting things about being close to someone like him. When you live alongside it day after day, when you train together, teach together, laugh together, and just exist in the same orbit for long enough, your sense of what is “normal” quietly shifts. Not dramatically. Not in a way you notice at the time. It just adjusts.

There is a memory of one day in our front room, our home gym, shortly after suffering a major injury, well before brain cancer, spotting Cameron while he loaded weight onto the bar. Watching him prepare for the lift and, strangely, the main concern wasn’t whether he should be doing it. It was whether the bar itself would hold. It had started to bend slightly in the middle and bounce a bit, not dangerously, just enough to trigger an uneasiness.

But none of that translated into questioning the situation itself. Neither of us stopped. Neither of us discussed it. We just carried on.

At no point did the thoughts, Didn’t doctors doubt you’d be able to train like this again after you broke your back?
Or, Are you really holding your bodyweight over your head right now?
Or even, Is this really a good idea?

Only after the fact, with time and proximity, did thoughts of being a terrible choice for a spotter arise.

If anything went wrong, there was absolutely no chance to help him. 

Those thoughts simply didn’t surface at the time. The moment didn’t feel unusual. It felt ordinary.

That’s the thing about proximity. Being close to Cameron warped your sense of scale.

Not because he talked about himself in big terms – he never did – but because the way he lived recalibrated your internal benchmarks. He made the impossible possible, not just for what he did, but also for what you did. Training through pain. Teaching through exhaustion. Carrying responsibility without complaint. Showing up, again and again, even when it would have been entirely understandable not to.

When you’re inside that rhythm, you don’t narrate it as courage or resilience or anything particularly impressive. It’s just how things are done. You adapt to it without realising you’ve adapted at all.

His pace becomes the pace.
His standards become the standards.
His version of “that’s just how we do things” becomes yours.

We think about the way Cameron taught, and not just what he taught but how he taught it. We’ve written before about the way he could turn a room full of four-year-olds into an absolute chaotic giggling heap on the floor, collapsing over each other, completely losing it, and then, with a single phrase, bring them back into perfect focus. At the time, it felt like magic. Now, we understand it was something far more deliberate than that. It was intention. Timing. Trust. Presence.

But back then, standing next to him, none of it felt remarkable.

Of course, Sensei could do that.
Of course, the kids would follow him.

Of course, the room would shift back to focus.

Why wouldn’t it?

There were days when we knew he was exhausted. Days when we knew the pain was there, and the fatigue was heavy. When every rational argument said he could take the day off, and no one would have blamed him. And yet, he would still turn up, teach, joke, mop the floors (in a very meticulous way – if you know, you know), and give everything he had to the school. And then quietly pay for it later.

We didn’t applaud him for that. We didn’t frame it as heroic. We didn’t even talk about it much.

It was just Cameron being Cameron.

It’s only with time, and with absence, that the distortion starts to correct itself.

You find yourself replaying moments and suddenly thinking, Hang on… that was actually quite extraordinary. It only felt standard because he made it so.

Cameron had this incredible ability to normalise things that most people would categorise as exceptional. Courage felt like baseline behaviour. Kindness felt like a minimum requirement. Responsibility wasn’t optional. It was simply assumed.

He didn’t lecture about these things. He lived them so consistently that questioning them felt unnecessary.

That’s powerful. And, in some ways, feels dangerous, because when someone like that is no longer there, you’re left standing in the space they occupied, suddenly aware that the floor has dropped away.  

Or at least it felt like that, until we found our footing, and grounded ourselves.

And discovered that levelling up beyond others’ expectations is not only a Cameron thing, because a team of Superneers is driving his legacy of stretching beyond possibilities, carrying Paragon into the future. 

We Create Superheroes is Paragon’s catch phrase. Cameron started this by not just teaching skills. He reset expectations.

The floor didn’t drop away. He didn’t leave us floundering and unable to find our feet. In fact he did the opposite.

He raised the floor and removed the ceiling.

The floor of how you treat people.
The floor of how seriously you take your role.
The floor of how much effort counts as “enough.”

Once you’ve lived inside that standard, lowering it feels uncomfortable. You know what “better” looks like, because you’ve seen it lived, not just talked about it.

There’s a temptation, when someone is gone, to elevate them into something untouchable. To polish the edges. To remove the stubbornness. To smooth out the contradictions.

But Cameron doesn’t need that.

His power was never in being flawless. It was in being consistent. Consistently present. Consistently demanding, of himself most of all. Consistently kind.

Now, with the distance of years, we can see it more clearly. We see how unusual it was to train the way he trained, to teach the way he taught, to live the way he lived — with urgency, humour, discipline, and deep humanity. We can also see why it didn’t feel unusual to us, being in the Cameronsphere. Because it felt natural to him… as it was true to his values, true to his responsibilities, and true to the people he cared about. 

This is why those things felt natural around Cameron. Because he made it the standard.

Yes, of course, we can start training again next week after our building wall fell over. 

Yes, of course, we can turn the Supercentre into an Underwater World.

On Cameron’s birthday, we don’t just celebrate all that he achieved. We think about all the ways he normalised the extraordinary. And how, even now, that “normal” still shapes the way we teach at Paragon – and, what we expect of ourselves, in all the other aspects of life. And we hope, shapes what other people can also believe is possible.

Nathan and Teresa 20th January 2026