Head of School’s Notebook: Joy

March 4, 2022

In Monday’s Convocation, Cate was visited by a hypnotist. We have had so many marvelous and compelling speakers this year, many of whom our kids are still buzzing about – Athena Jones ’90, Sonia Nazario, Walter Riley and Candida Pugh, Von Miller – but even relative to such luminaries, the hypnotist generates a palpable buzz of anticipation. An annual event until COVID-19, the energy was perhaps also about a return to the familiar.

Years ago, I remember seeing two of our students who were convinced under hypnosis that they were the roadrunner and Wiley E. Coyote respectively. Their subsequent antics in Hitchcock Theatre had the community in total hysterics, especially with the persistent “beep, beep” emanating from the roadrunner. I remember asking both of those students following the convocation if they were aware of what they were doing. They said that they were. And that that they found it fun. “I had no inhibition,” one of them said. “It felt great.”

This year’s seniors told a similar story. “It was fun,” they said. “Just what we needed.” The narrative wasn’t altogether different, in fact, from stories those seniors have told over the years about other spirited schoolwide events. The Cate Olympics, campus-wide Capture The Flag, the Elimination Game, Dodgeball Tournaments, athletic contests when the Blue Crew is at its energetic best, Free Day announcements: such collective moments of joy give us something special, something – to borrow from our seniors – that we need.

The thought brought to mind an essay I read earlier in the week by Sunita Puri. Dr. Puri is a physician specializing in palliative care writing about the tragic weight of these last two years. Among other things, she suggests that we should dispense with the fiction that sadness or grief is something we overcome. That isn’t the way it works. We carry it all, perpetually, a reminder of who we are, of who we have known, of how we have loved. Her conception provides a certain smoothing effect on life’s lowest moments, so many of which have been felt in one way or another in the last few years.

I wonder if the same pattern applies to moments of joy and laughter and friendship. For they do not seem transient to me and they must be as much a part of us as our moments of grief. I would hate to make more of a hypnotist visiting campus than I should. Maybe it was just a meaningless diversion from other, weightier parts of life.

But then again, for some, perhaps many, it was not meaningless. Dr. Puri writes of “bearing witness.”  “Witnessing requires seeing another’s pain as no different from our own,” she says. Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this, with respect to joy or grief. That every moment we live regardless of how random or powerful it might be gives us something, teaches us something, connects us to something, and makes us more of who we each are. That fact won’t minimize our lows or expand our highs but it’s a reminder that we ourselves have that capability.

Our students demonstrated that very aptitude this week, thanks in part to a hypnotist and hijinks that made us all smile.