<p>I’ve always been a fan of college commencement speeches and graduation talks and ■■■■■ around for the best of them. I liked this snippet from the talk given by this year’s student School Chair at Thacher. </p>
<p>"In a heart-wrenching but essential scene in Steven Spielberg’s film version of Peter Pan, as Peter is about to go save Wendy from Captain Hook’s perilous clutches, the Lost Boys, who have never been without each other nor their leader, share a few lines in which Thud Butt says, “Don’t leave us, Peter, and don’t say goodbye.”</p>
<p>Then one of the younger boys, aptly named Too Small, asks, “What’s goodbye?”</p>
<p>And a third boy, Ace, replies, “It’s going away, that’s what it is. Forgetting about us all over again.”</p>
<p>The sad truth is that Ace is kind of right. As we age, as we leave one way of life and enter another, as we meet people and love people whose lives have been far cries from our own, as the future becomes shorter and the past longer, we do forget. The motions we’ve gone through, the rhythm of daily life, the real-time stresses of excelling academically and athletically and artistically during the most challenging time of our lives will mostly fade from our memories of this place. I think what’s more important, however, and more of a mark of the Thacher experience, are all the things the school has taught us that we won’t think about as memories. The keys to a healthy lifestyle, the way to conduct an enlightening conversation, the right language in the right moment, how to judge character fairly and justly, how to love someone, how to belong to something “whole and perfect” as Mr. Jacobsen put it, I could go on; in the most demanding of circumstances that life can throw at you, you will innately know how to be the best version of yourself, and when you step back from the moment you will think, “I learned that at Thacher. How could I take it for granted?”</p>