I remember meeting most of you in person for the first time when you were 8th graders, 10 feet from where I am standing now, checking in morning COVID forms with Chris Chakeres. That’s where I learned that both conveniently and confusingly, 11% of you are named Lily or Ethan. At the risk of inflating your healthy self-confidence into something more, I knew right away that the class of 2025 had main character aura – as Inho would say.
- This year, we had six National Merit scholar semi-finalists – more than 10% of the class.
- Amongst you are multiple district champions, state champions, and school and state record holders.
- Speaking of main character aura, our drama department has also been on an incredible run – we have been nominated for best musical production in NM five years in a row, and many talented thespians are graduating today. Bravo.
- I’ll skip over the drama and stresses we wouldn’t have had without you because it’s a formal occasion, and doing so makes my remarks considerably shorter.
- These achievements are the results of you finding agency and excellence and, as you shared with us last night, more than a little joy. Though your work here is done, you’ll take the habits and skills that produced these great outcomes with you when you leave Prep.
Ceremonies like today are difficult to wrap your mind around; they are both a total clique and alarmingly real. The truth is, like the Green River flowing through Desolation Canyon, life consists of some one-way thresholds– that once we cross, we cannot truly return, because if and when we do return– to run the river again– or we are lucky enough to have you return to Santa Fe Prep, you will do so as a different person. Leaving this familiar place where you have been seen and been successful, and soon, leaving your parents’ home, is a massive transition.
Unexpectedly to me, the months after my high school graduation were a very low period in my life. Yes, I’d graduated from high school and been admitted to college, and I missed my parents (who, by the way, are here in the audience to see their grandson graduate). My first year of college, I struggled to find roommates and classmates who shared my values, an issue complicated by the fact that I wasn’t sure what my values were. And, I missed my teammates from my high school sports teams. Also, everything in my college dining hall tasted like oatmeal – except the oatmeal itself, which tasted like dish soap. I grew up in Seattle, which, like Santa Fe, is a place where good food and art are found on every street corner, and I missed the spicy Korean barbecue from my neighborhood restaurant, like you’ll miss green chile next year. Worse, top forty music was everywhere and terrible – every time I turned on the radio, CC Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat was droning on like the chorus from a Greek tragedy. Man, I hated that song – and I was sweating a little bit.
Self-evidently, that was a long time ago, and I had forgotten all about these feelings until Gordon Zang’s excellent senior speech (one of many, I might add) which reminded me of how excited and vulnerable I felt at that time. Also, on the senior trip, I overheard two students having a brief conversation about Frank Lloyd Wright that reminded me of the famous architect’s theory of compression and expansion. When you enter a Frank Lloyd Wright building, you enter a tight space, it’s uncomfortable, like going into a cave; the psychological tension that is created abates as you take a few steps into a high-ceiling room, like a literal version of the prisoner’s emergence from Plato’s allegorical Cave.
- Compression and expansion,
- Stimulus and response
- Bewilderment and epiphany
- Love and heartbreak
These cycles exist, and they’re essential.
While you’re compressed physically right now, you’re actually in a period of psychological and emotional expansion, predicated on the work that got you here today. Undoubtedly, this is a mountaintop to celebrate, but it is far from the only one that you will climb.
This dichotomy, compression and expansion, elegantly reminds us that post-traumatic growth is essential. As the physicians in the audience can confirm, Nietzsche and Kanye West were wrong – what does not kill you is not guaranteed to make you stronger – but it is what makes you uniquely you and likely wiser.
If we stayed at room temperature our entire lives, we would be like unfired clay, fragile and dull. Emotional and intellectual learning happens only at high temperatures, like a glaze oxidizing in the heat of the kiln.
Though it is much maligned, stress is actually a renewable energy source. Difficult experiences, though painful, create energy that can be harnessed. And, counterintuitively, in a world where we are often advised to practice self-care by detaching, we are often happiest and healthiest when we attach ourselves to other people and important causes.
All of us live in an America that is experiencing profound compression. Whether you’re for it or against it, it’s not an exaggeration to say every element of American politics, constitutional law, administrative oversight, economic regulation, and public norms– are undergoing a profound state of change. We cannot help but be part of this process, and if we focus on enduring principles; fairness, integrity, and respect, we can take this energy and rebound forward in the directions that we find fair and just, and each of us and all of us can and will move forward.
The period of sweaty insecurity that I described in my first year of college didn’t last forever – but it led me to redefine myself as a student, to be more outgoing, and to apply for a job as a teaching intern, which would become the central interest of my life. Recently, a friend introduced me to the image of a nautilus, an organism that knows the correct time to build a new chamber of its radial shell. Like a nautilus, first uncomfortably and later, gratefully, I moved on, finding the next chamber of myself – because I had outgrown the old me, as you have done so beautifully today.
Class of 2025, congratulations and thank you for your impressive impact and contributions to Santa Fe Prep. On behalf of our faculty and staff, we celebrate you and wish you well – please stay in touch.
-Aaron Schubach