Commencement Address 2024

Welcome parents and students, faculty and staff, neighbors, congregants and parishioners, and all others who are joining us today to celebrate the achievements of these students.

The other day, my daughter queried me asking whether I could believe that the year was nearly over, and that this would mean the beginning of high school for her. That aspect of this progression is distressing, but instead of self-indulgent forlornness I told her that it all felt as though it were happening too quickly. It was as if I were stationary while the same familiar scenes spun endlessly round me. The seasons changed, it was hot, leaves fell, snow came and went, the picnic happened, and it was warm again. We read books, discussed them, had our laughs, got stressed, felt relieved, reveled in the student’s performances, went on our trips, were uplifted by our adventures, and now we are back here again. With over a decade of commencement addresses, you might share in some sympathy for how this could come to feel.

However, in another way, no year is like any other year, and no class is like any other class. Certainly, it is true that one minute we were beginning a new year, and I was just getting to know these students seated behind me in a moral philosophy class or on a trip to Telluride. Many of them, like Sophie, I had been waiting eagerly to have in class for years. We did the via ferrata and hiked to Blue Lake, laughed uproariously around a campfire listening to Nic and Tali trade barbs and marveled, bemused, at Cate crying at the profundity of the scenery. Yes, it is a bit like standing in the middle of a merry-go-round with a dizzying and kaleidoscopic panoply of images moving past that are outside of your control, but if you become numb to what you are witnessing and acting as a part of, things become felt with shallowness, and we risk taking all of these experiences and people for granted. If you are not intentional about your participation in this educative and experiential endeavor, you will never feel confident in your purpose the way you did in your first years.

This has bearing on the advice I would offer to our graduates because when students have asked me what my senior thesis would be, I have always been conflicted as to whether purpose or resilience would be the mainstay of my thesis. To persist in a purpose that is larger than yourself is noble enough, but to not be unmanned in your pursuit, requires fortitude, a huge heart, magnanimity, and no shortage of stamina.

The senior thesis asks, “What is essential to the good life?” This question is framed in such a way that whatever is essential must subordinate everything else in order to achieve the good life. Aristotle, for instance, opens the Nicomachean Ethics by writing that, “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so, the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.” Purpose is important, and I hope that we have educated every person on this stage to believe that it is essential to their wellbeing without having told them what it ought to be. We do not choose for them. They read the same books, go on many of the same trips, worked on the same plays and musicals, and yet, they emerge from a common curriculum highly individualistic. The conversations they have with one another, far exceed in thoughtfulness and civility those that have been modeled for them by much of adult society. I cannot help but imagine that the purposes to which they will apply their talents will be as individuated as they are.

Purpose, however, can be a tough road, which is where resilience comes in. Were this my actual senior thesis, I would need to carefully define what I mean by ‘resilience’. Those who know me might suppose that by resilience I have in mind some exclusively militaristic definition. That’s one definition and not an inconsequential one. The Oxford English Dictionary provides a definition as, “The quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness; adaptability.” This definition has value as a starting point. “Recover quickly,” perhaps. “Recover easily,” hardly ever. “Resist being affected by,” no. To be unaffected is to live less fully; besides which, the unaffected rarely learn. One of Ridgeview’s longest standing mottoes, taken from Aeschylus, is that “we learn by suffering.” Aeschylus, expanding on this theme in Agamemnon wrote, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Many students have joked about the ways this might apply to their lives given Ridgeview’s rigor and the busyness it introduced into their lives. It is rarer for them—or anyone—to connect it with steadfastness of purpose.

One of the themes many seniors touched on in their theses this year was gratitude. In fact, for whom or what we were grateful for was one of the questions that made the rounds at our final campfire this year as we all stood shivering in a cold, windy, distinctly Wyoming night. One of the people I am most thankful for is Dr. McMahon. In 2017, he and his wife gifted me a book entitled With Love and Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks to the Next Generation. I have since read it at least twice, and what I mean by resilience is well captured by its author F. Washington Jarvis. Towards the end of the book, Jarvis writes, “A man my age shared with me this summer the story of his boyhood. His mother was psychotic, his father alcoholic. From the time he was twelve he received from them no understanding, no support, no love. He was often abused, falsely accused, devastated. No one in his school seemed to notice or care. No one reached out to him. He was utterly alone. His life was a living hell. Later in the summer I visited a friend in the hospital who is in the last stages of brain cancer. Once a joyfully exuberant bon vivant, he stared at me without a flicker of recognition, his once sparkling eyes eerily vacant. Life is tough. It is tough even for lucky people.”

When you are young, you imagine resilience to mean that you can endure the imaginable. As you age, you realize and worry that it will involve remaining unbroken by the unimaginable. When first loves painfully unwind, when friends are taken from us too early, or when we ourselves are diagnosed with some life-altering illness, our first thoughts are rarely about our own resilience. Mired amongst our pity and self-pity, our purpose is nearly lost in the temptation to submit.

To return to my refutation that I only have military examples in mind, I would point to Nick Lavery, who was the first combat amputee and Green Beret to return to battle. I realize that this seems counterintuitive: a military example to prove that they are not all military examples. However, in his book, Objective Secure, how he lost his leg is a minor aspect of his story. In scarcely a paragraph, Lavery wrote of the actual incident that, “With approximately three weeks left in our deployment, I was shot five times during an insider attack—four times in my right leg and once in my lower left. The MedEvac bird (helicopter) couldn’t land during the ongoing ambush, so I was forced to wait over an hour to be airlifted out. With my femur shattered and my femoral artery severed, I should have died that day. Instead, my injuries ultimately resulted in the amputation of my right leg above the knee.” The remainder of the book is a comeback story with Lavery recounting his time at Walter Reed and his determination to recover. The real story about resilience is the head games we have to play to see ourselves through and to continue undeterred and undaunted in our purpose.

When I was in high school, there was a teacher who most of us greatly respected. Most of us. Once, when I was in trouble for fighting, and he was doing the hard work of trying to make an impression on my hard head and harder heart about the importance of purpose, I, in the full bloom of my teenage angst and aggression said with as much condescension as I could muster, “So, you think this is your purpose?” He shrugged off my insolence and said pointedly, “You know, some of us have the courage to give it all away not knowing whether we’ll get it back in spades. Will you?”

Cynicism is easy. Without knowing anyone’s story, it’s easy to claim that too many are content to live careful lives, and mostly those that do make for very boring dinner companions. The life of the cubicle drone, the conchologist who hopes to buy his way into evermore prestigious social circles and curate competitive depictions of his lifestyle on social media to inspire the envy of those he’s foolish enough to regard as friends is a distinct possibility. But it is all more complicated. Plato, I think rightly, fretted about those who would “distinguish the shadows” despite knowing that they were false. Instead of living at the feet of Mammon, I hope what Ridgeview has taught you of history and of character has at least whetted your appetites for something more. I hope ordinary is insufficient and that surviving bears little resemblance to living. I hope you have the courage to live fully and that you do not pursue fads and shortcuts in hopes that showy exhibitions of a pretended individuality will stand in place for actually having done something notable. In order to pursue and achieve some element of this, you must have the courage to risk and the endurance to fail repeatedly, the resilience to withstand the adversity and the critics, and an understanding that your life is an accumulation rather than an epiphany.

It has always been interesting to me that we deliver a commencement address at the end of our time together given that to commence means to begin. Eric Greitens writing in his book Resilience noted that, “You’ll understand your own life better, and the lives of others better, if you stop looking for critical decisions and turning points. Your life builds not by dramatic acts, but by accumulation.” Greitens is specifically addressing habituation. He writes, “People like to imagine that they will “rise to the occasion”…people rarely do. What happens, in fact, is that when things get really hard and people are really afraid, they sink to the level of their training. You train your habits. And if a critical moment does come, all you can be is ready for it.” If we, meaning Ridgeview as a school and you as students, have done our jobs, we have already begun. You began building habits when you memorized those lines for the play or for a class recitation, when you took classes that were excruciating for you, when you suffered with the teacher you did not like, when you didn’t get enough sleep and still had to power through the day, when you struggled to meet the mark in a fitness test, when you were dispirited losing games in an athletic endeavor and still had to return to practice the next day; you learned resilience when the first relationship wounded you deeply and still had to suck it up and go to class with that person the next day, when friends betrayed you, and you had to make up and get on with it—to quote Jarvis from earlier, life is tough even if you’re lucky. “Life isn’t neat. Life isn’t tidy. And philosophy,” wrote Greitens, “needs to speak to life. Philosophy is not, for me, a discipline about writing clever papers. It’s a discipline about living well. The philosopher shouldn’t offer a way of thinking, but a way of living.” What you need, and partly what you’ve already acquired, is a way of choosing and pursuing noble purpose with a philosophy that will allow you to be badly bent without being broken.

Still, people want resilience to be summed up and simplified. It cannot. It has to be as dogged as the world is variable without dulling us to the fullness of living. Our purpose more often meets its demise by simple self-betrayal than by external obstruction. Resilience keeps us from being broken down, but what gives us encouragement? What is it that makes it possible to sustain commitment to my purpose without being undone by senseless boredom or the perception that the project is pointless? It is you. I cannot imagine life as a superintendent or a district principal because it is too detached from what gives this project vivacity. There have been too many hard days, despairing days with hard decisions to be made, and what has kept me afloat, aside from my inimitable Emma, is being in a classroom with all of you, on a trip with all of you, at a restaurant with all of you, at a musical marveling at all of you.

I have been relieved from my burdens walking into a class to be greeted by the chaos of Tali and Nic lavishing attention on Omar, and Omar politely, but clearly embarrassed, demurring as if to say, “It’s time to move on.” He was the gracious straight man to Tali and Nic’s comic duo.

If I was not already persuaded of my student’s fundamentally good moral character, what I witnessed about friendship between Sonorah and Lilly easily reassured me, though Sonorah’s patience with Lilly on the senior ruck might have been the ultimate testament. The follies have always been a favorite, and I have always laughed at depictions of my own idiosyncrasies. This, however, was the first year a student literally portrayed my inner voice, and now Lola will be stuck in my head in perpetuity. It was so unnerving that, as I shared with her, I downloaded a voice analyzer app after her performance just to make sure I was still me. While most of the students made me eager to come to class, Zaley made me nervous, but in the final analysis, I think I sidestepped most of her fierceness by letting her spar with Gabe instead of me. That she cared enough to argue her points, however, was evidence not only of her intellect, but of her deep sense of justice.

I wrote in TJ’s yearbook that I doubt whether he is aware of how many people are deeply impressed by his progress and performance, both as a student and as an athlete. This is wholly true and not mere flattery. His perseverance in all things has been remarkable. Jade’s only fault is her quietness, and it’s a funny fault in that it robs others of the privilege of knowing her. While an artist first, she has a clever sense of humor and her remarks were always insightful. Noah, apart from having a keen sartorial sense, worked harder and had a clearer vision for what he wanted his papers to say than I ever would have expected from him, and I will miss the gentleness with which I saw him treat his sister with each morning in the lobby.

I think what I saw from Nicolas in Telluride was something I had thoroughly not expected, and it was huge courage. I often talk with students about the difficulty of striking the right balance with the narratio in the senior thesis—how much to reveal about oneself? It’s not an easy thing to tell our story and determine how much vulnerability to show in explaining why we are who we are, and yet Nic put it all on the table, admitted to hard things, and it made me appreciate him not because I saw him as a victim, but as an unlikely victor with a unique story. He was not entirely unlike his good friend from “deepest, darkest Peru”—Tali. My earliest memories of Tali were not positive, and while Mrs. Hobaugh and Mr. Martin made their best cases for him, ultimately, early on, my patience for him was kept alive by Emma pleading her case about how he was actually a good guy. Then, he improved a little, and then a lot, and then I found myself surprised at how far he’d come and how much I looked forward to seeing him in class. I am hugely impressed with Tali and with his acumen; in fact, so much so that I changed my moral philosophy course in response to his comments about Stoicism. 

Angelina was stunning on stage in part because even her volume there stood in contrast to what one became accustomed to in class where her voice was most deeply felt in the majesty of her writing. Sophie sat in the famous “reliable ally” seat, but despite this, she was definitely her own woman. She was every bit the reliable, overly busy, and overachieving student the other teachers promised me she would be. In this sense, she was similar to Aiden. I knew, from other’s stories, that he would be an impressive student, and he was. He was thoroughly amiable and willing to take the contrary view and defend it in class.

Elea, for whom I have such fond memories, was mature beyond her years from the moment I first met her, and she first caught my attention as an intellectual force when she was in tenth grade. That never let up, and I was deeply privileged that she and Cate allowed me to advise their theses. Cate, who was positive from first thing in the morning to last thing in the evening, who drove up three separate times to be with her class for the senior ruck despite the obnoxious weather, could bring positivity to any situation. Ainsley who worked hard to manage two ends of the table: mine and Gabe’s, and patiently put up with all of my teasing in my desperate efforts to get her to smile each day.

Gabe was a conundrum, is a conundrum. He said things that were brilliant and other things I still don’t understand (though I might be addled and he brilliant). In his own way, he attempted, perhaps valiantly even, to make me better, and while I don’t know whether he was successful there, I do believe he was successful in making his classmates better. Estha, who I will admit I did not initially anticipate getting along with, had the heart of a fighter, and she sung like it, which won me over to her, and made me a little less enthusiastic about class when she wasn’t there. Kaden, who had the energy of a trip hammer and a heart of gold, was yet another exemplary demonstration of good character and formidable friendship. Wolfgang was a surprise similar to Angelina in a way: he spoke so little in class that by the time I heard his senior thesis, I could be nothing but impressed by the quality of his thinking.

Emily brightened so many days and is possessed of a very clever sense of humor. I will never forget her in Mrs. Hayhurst’s conference room giving a police report claiming that she was a victim and them reminding her that she was, in fact, a witness. Noureen opened up around the campfire and made more sense of her story in coming to America, and knowing a little about how difficult this was for her, made her perseverance all the more impressive. Flyer was always on the queue, and yet when it came his turn to speak, he struggled to get it all out before saying, “I don’t know what I am saying. Can you come back to me?” I always had a deep sympathy for this because I admired his desire to contribute to the class discussion, and respected how complex the thought he wanted to articulate must be.

Andrew and Joe—my boys, my most boyish boys. Joe the tractor to whom I whispered when he said something entirely sensible toward the end of the year, “Why haven’t you been like this all year?” Joe might grumble, but he will go the distance, which is why I tried to drag him along with me whether he wanted to go or not. I’m glad that he indulged most of the time. Andrew will take on just about any challenge put before him. I suspect that if he doesn’t do well, Andrew will just return to the drawing board, make a new plan, and go about it a second, a third, and a fourth time with about the same level of enthusiasm as he did on the first attempt. Both have been good company and a reassurance that boyhood is not dead.

As I imagine every parent here can attest, it has all happened too quickly, but it has not been monotonous. It has been deeply memorable, and as I have written in your yearbooks, I hope you leave Ridgeview with many happy memories. You have, collectively, been the source of my resilience and a reassurance that my purpose has not been in vain. I do not know how to pay you a higher compliment. I will miss you all. I thank you all. And, I wish you all the very best.

D. Anderson

Headmaster