Learning About Community Again and Anew
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t has been a season of frosty mornings on the grounds, one of those New England springs that bursts forth in blooms of lilacs and black flies with the first string of warm May days. This spring — mask-optional for the first time in two years — is both a celebration and a reckoning. It is easy to celebrate a return to normalcy of sorts, a greater ease in planning and interaction after two years of distance and cancellation. It also is a reckoning of that experience — the weight of our distancing and ensuing isolation as we now attempt to reconnect in meaningful face-to-face and screen-free ways. It is clear those two years of the pandemic — years of anxiety, separation, and loss — have cost us a great deal. Setting aside for a moment, with the utmost dignity and respect, the incredible loss of life and the ongoing health and economic challenges many among us face, our society is not finding reconnection simple or easy. Pre-pandemic, we expected to spend time with each other, shared time commuting, on either side of classes or meetings; or the many hours spent together brainstorming, discussing, creating, critiquing — none of it anonymous, distant, or asynchronous. We took being in-person for granted, including the countless, unplanned interactions, large and small, that grease the rails of community and the many relationships required to live and work together. When we had to substitute, we necessarily became focused on screens and schedules. We have spent many long hours looking at ourselves on screen and listening to our own voices. The “I” has subsumed the “we.”
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spshorae.com Alumni Horae | Issue III 21/22
As our society emerges from this pandemic, we are learning about community again and anew. Community is not just about physically coming together, as we do in Chapel here on the grounds. It also is about the energy we create in real interactions — with nature, with people, with human experience. That energy is shaped by the ways we consider the needs of others when we speak; by the duty of care as we contemplate how our words and deeds affect others; by the mantra, “listen, learn, then respond.” As PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel argues in her 2020 book, Dare to Speak, these are the duties of living in community, the assumed agreements that form the basis of an ethical community in which we can trust each other. In many ways, this is what our School Prayer asks of us — “that in all the joys of life we may never forget to be kind,” and kindness should not be confused with niceness; that we “be unselfish in friendship,” and consider others and their intent; that we are “thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves,” and provide sympathy and empathy for our neighbor as we would for ourselves; and that we be “eager to bear the burdens of others,” which demands we learn about and understand those burdens so we may offer relief. Ultimately, our School Prayer establishes an important framework for the responsibility we have to each other in community — ethically and spiritually. It is elegantly phrased and easy to remember, focused outwardly from the first person “we” and “us” and “our,” not “I” and “me” and “mine.” Over these coming weeks, as we celebrate Graduation and Anniversary on the grounds, we will be celebrating “we” and “us.” I hope that, as we rejoin and rebuild our communities all around the world, we can share and lead with these values in mind, heart, and spirit. Warmly,
MICHAEL SEAMANS
FROM THE RECTOR
