Upper School Director's Blog: April 2020

I will always remember the day I was hit by a car while riding my motorcycle. It was a bright, cold day, and I was riding the speed limit in a school zone when a high-school student pulled out from a stop sign and sent everything flying.

I flew in a helicopter to the trauma center and then spent hours in surgery, days in the ICU, weeks at home in bed, and months on crutches. It was painful. I spent a lot of time inside staring at a screen. The second semester was ruined, the summer was spent catching up, and things still weren’t quite right in the fall.

Life changed. The career I spent years preparing for was gone. The physical talents that I thought were key to my identity were slightly askew. The changes stretched all the way down to how I laced up my shoes. And people said, “Wow, I can barely tell anything happened to you.”

However, I will always remember that day not for what was lost, but for what I gained. I learned in the aftermath that my true calling, my talent—my actual vocation—was teaching and coaching and mentoring young people, and I learned that my true center point lay in my family and home. The result, ironically, has been thirty years of happiness, or as Robert Frost would say, that day “has made all the difference.”

So here we are as a school. We were out on a bright, cold spring day, minding our own business, going the speed limit, doing our work, making progress, looking forward to the upcoming sports season, prom, Spring Unit, graduation… when suddenly everything went flying. Now we are surrounded by machines and screens, and we don’t feel like we can really go outside. For some of us, the experience has been truly painful to our family and friends. We hope that the summer allows us to catch up. We hope things will be alright in the fall. We hope people will say one day, “I can barely tell anything happened at all.”

What shall we do, then? Let us not look at what we have lost but find out what we have gained. It is not a choice between two wheels or four; maybe we can even choose wings. Let us listen to what the future is calling us to become. There are new talents out there. Let’s find them. There are relationships to (re)build. Let’s nurture them. There are opportunities, as Tennyson wrote, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Let’s seize them.

If we can do these things, we may say in five, ten, or thirty years, oddly enough and against all expectation, that this time has changed who we are and what our world has become, and that will make all the difference. I look forward to seeing you land on your feet, certainly, but after that to seeing you fly.