Commencement 2024: Speech by Head of School Allison Gaines Pell
Welcome all. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to see all of you here this morning on such an important day. Seeing you assembled brings me great joy.
Thank you first to the dedicated team of people who have worked hard to make today possible. It takes a village to create an event like this and some supernatural influence to ensure this weather, and we appreciate each one of you for your great attention to detail, your months of planning and preparation, and for this glorious weather.
Thank you to the faculty and staff who have advised, taught and counseled the students before you today, whether this year or in the past.
To our trustees, whose steady support and discernment has helped us in so many ways to support our community.
To the many people who have come before us here at The Wheeler School, and to Mary Colman Wheeler herself for the vision to bring Wheeler Farm and the Wheeler School into existence.
To our parents, guardians, and other family members who have been with us all along the journey of the Class of 2024. And on that note, soon-to-be graduates, make sure you spend a lot of time heaping loads of thanks on them today even as they celebrate you. They made this possible.
I also want to honor those across the world who are suffering today wherever they may be, and those in our own lives who we wish could be with us today. We can and do live in a world that can be both joyful and painful at once, and we can hold both at the same time as we express gratitude for being together. Let’s hold them for a moment in our thoughts.
Let’s silence our inner thoughts and our phones and be present here for the Class of 2024 during this important moment.
Just last week, I had the pleasure to see our Nest students mark the end of pre-k and the beginning of kindergarten. Just a few feet away and exactly one week later, we are here to celebrate these students who are embarking on their own rite of passage. As they say, the days are long and the years are short. Weren’t all of you just walking into kindergarten one minute ago? I know your families feel that way.
There are some scientists and philosophers who argue that all of time exists at once. In poignant moments like this one, it can feel palpable. We are here today celebrating our graduates, yes, but we are also here witnessing and celebrating the miniature incremental details that have made up your lives. We see you all here, beautiful, strong, a little messier for your life in the world, with a few scars and bruises as well as memories that feel too good to be true; a little more resilient and resplendent. All at once, we see you with your scraped knee when you were six and your big goal when you were ten, and you crossing the street or riding your bike for the first time alone, and you finding your best friend, and you losing your first friend, and you on the first day of Upper School and the last day of Lower School, and you this morning, and you on the day you burst into our lives.
And so how is it possible to wrap it all up and issue just the right words for you as you go? Sometimes, we are at a loss.
To find the words I want to say to begin Commencement each year, I try to open my eyes and ears a little wider, to listen more closely to what you show us about who you have become as you get ready to launch. And so came the words when I watched as the 18 Wheelers’ 11 seniors performed their last songs, each preceded by a short tribute to them from another member of the group. The songs were wonderful, as always, but the tributes said it all. One by one, you depicted each senior with loving and close attention, specificity, humility and appreciation, not only remarking on what makes them unique and special and to be deeply missed, but also the way they made the group better for their participation.
It was lost on no one watching that evening in the courtyard that inside that group was a palpable culture of love and care. But that’s not the only place we can see it in this Class of 2024: it’s in the art you make, the teams you form, the projects you complete. Your kindness, your joy, your amazing engagement. How do you do that? I think it’s a choice you’ve made; it has been intentionally cultivated. In the 18 Wheelers’ case, it happens through music, perhaps, but it clearly extends to all of you: you stand close, you move in harmony and sometimes dissonance, you listen to one another and choose to keep working on it when it doesn’t work. This has happened through your many experiences together over these four years or 14.
That feeling you have right now, that sense of warmth and glowing as you sit here surrounded by one another and your loved ones; that’s the feeling of a soft heart. My advice to you is to take with you the gift that you have given us: let your heart be soft.
Letting your heart be soft is not always as easy as it might feel today because it means knowing that others – all of us – have a soft heart too. The world can be rough, and it can push and pull and divide. Remember what Mrs. Bomba says: we can bring joy to one another, but when one is hurting, so are we all. We bring you together at Wheeler from so many walks of life because we know that school is a place where you learn to gather with intention. Gathering is an act of being together, hearing and knowing one another in all of our ways, and it isn’t always easy. It requires care, humility, uneasiness, sometimes true discomfort or even pain, and curiosity. Being together requires acknowledging that inside of each of us exists all the multitudes – being kind, mean, joyful, worried, exceptional, ordinary, wise, or much less so. It requires knowing that we can be the hero and the villain and a whole lot in between all at once, sometimes in the course of one day.
Letting your heart be soft means being humble about your discovery of the world and its people. As one student, Izzy Mitchell, wrote in her Wheeler essay: “[The people at Wheeler] have taught me to be, and they’ve also taught me that I am not finished learning how to be. THAT humility and understanding – that there is always more to learn and also that the best things in my life are unknown and unpredictable, and may even present themselves as something scary and overwhelming – I will carry with me for the rest of my life.” Having a soft heart means that you know that you don’t yet know, that the more you find out, the more questions you’ll have. Remember, as Ms. Henneman has so often reminded you over these years, that we do not know other people’s stories, at least until we seek them out.
So, as you go, my wish for you is that you are as caring and thoughtful as we have tried to teach and inspire you to be, that you keep that soft heart about you, use it often, and share it with others. The world will be better for it. Thank you for sharing it with us.
So, dear Class of 2024, with gratitude and excitement, let us commence.
