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Stay a While and Listen

Senior Class Oration by Martin Shedd

Well, folks, this is the end, or, at least, an end.  In just a little while we will all be walking across the stage to accept our diplomas and off into the future we’ll go.  You see, everything up until now has been preparing us for this future.  Everyone has been helping us along the way with that one goal in mind and right now what’s standing in your way is me, my speech, and this podium.  I’ll bet you’re all raring to go.  But I want you to hold it.  Stay a while, and listen.

Most of our lives we’ve been being pushed ever onward.  When we were little we wanted to be older; when we were in grade school we were being prepared for the next grade; in high school our parents and college counselors have been talking college at us for the past two years.  What next?  In college we’ll stay a short time and then it will be about post-college plans.  Careers.  Graduate school.  And then from there it’s promotions and work and always, always, always moving forward.  And then one day we’ll be retired and we’ll finally have time to remember what’s going on right now.  Except it’ll be slightly different.

“Hey, Bill.  Bill?  BILL!”

“Yeah?”

“Remember that thing that happened at the place at that time with the thing and the…?”

“The Chat?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope”

“Yeah…me neither.”

So rather than thinking about now then, I want you to think about now, now.  Class of 2007, we’ve gone through some rough times.  We were around for the announcement of the closing of Northfield.  We were the guinea pig class for the reinstatement of the Freshman village and the beginning of the Camp Beckett program.  We were the last class to have the choice of whether or not to live on Northfield (Two thousand eight, the key word is choice. You didn’t have a choice).  We’ve dealt with faculty transitions, lack of facilities, multiple schedule changes, and you know what?  We’re still here. Some probably had some issues with the changes.  Some of us probably hated the school, sometimes.  Many of us probably thought of leaving.  But we didn’t.  And NMH has the largest living alumni population of the New England prep schools.  They all came here, too.  They stayed on.  So thinking about it, there must be something, right?  There has to be some connection that keeps people here and coming here.  I’m sure that many of you are thinking, “Yeah, but things have changed.  Things are changing.  This isn’t the NMH I applied to.”  Nope.  It’s not.  But this isn’t the first change.  I’m sure that for the people around the time of the ’71 merger NMH wasn’t the school they applied to, either.  Or in the early thirties, when Elliot Speer began to modernize the curriculum, start interscholastic sports, end required Sunday Vespers services, and even allow dancing!  There was quite the uproar about that!

So maybe the administration’s decisions aren’t what’s keeping us here.  Maybe it’s not even the classes we’ve taken, because all of us have probably had classes we’ve loved as well as those we’ve loved slightly less.  Some may even think that they’d be better off elsewhere.  Happier.  Ever stop to think that, just maybe, it’s the people here that are holding you?  I want you to look around your class for a second and find one person here that you know well.  Maybe it’s a friend, a roommate, the guy down the hall, or your boyfriend or girlfriend.  And now I want you to imagine next year without that person.  Without whatever influence they may have had on your life, what would be different?  I know it’s actually impossible to accurately imagine this, but try.  Maybe what people say about fate is true: that you end up wherever you are meant to be.  Your lives would not be the same without him or her.  And after this ceremony it’s up to you whether or not they continue to change your life, but for now just think about what they’ve already changed.

And now for something a little harder for some of you, find one adult who has changed your life.  Now, I don’t mean that this has to be a teacher whose class had some life-changing message to it that caused you to convert your religion or see life from a whole new angle, because that’s a little far-fetched.  Just some adult that has changed your life in some way.  I know that when putting myself to this same task, I couldn’t pick just one.  There are some amazingly inspirational people out there.  Have you ever had a conversation with adults who aren’t teachers in the classroom, but perhaps taught you some of life’s most important lessons?  My thoughts immediately go to Kathy Boudreau at the laundry building and Bunny Ball.  These are the people who are working daily to make sure that you can proceed with as few disruptions as possible.  And if you ever get a chance to speak to them, they will tell you stories about life.  Not necessarily lives we know well, but lives with honest stories and morals that if you really listen can change your whole outlook on life.

Or maybe it was your teacher who had the most profound impact on your life.  That teacher who taught you about world views that you hadn’t known about, made you really think about the side of an argument you’d never taken the time to consider, or even just provided an ear to vent your troubles to.  We spend a lot of time complaining about change, but no matter what the case, someone here has changed you and your life would be very different without them.  And maybe it could have happened elsewhere, but it happened here.  And you and I came out changed, sometimes a little more noticeably, other times more subtly.  To quote one of my favorite musicals, Wicked, “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”  Maybe that’s what it is about NMH that keeps people here and coming here.  This isn’t a place to avoid change, this is a place of change.  Powerful change.  And if you go racing off into the sunset and the future, you might never realize how much it has changed you.  So I want you to stay a while and listen, and think, and remember.  And realize right now that, looking around, you will never, ever be with this same group of people in your life.  And realize that the future also holds change, some good, some ill.  We’ll need to be ready when it comes, but, for now, stay a while and listen.