All-School Banquet: The Head of School's Remarks

It all started with Shelby Luce. 

We ambled down the Sespe to that horse haven alongside the river that once was the 19^th century Cottrell homestead.

A few years ago, wild fire ripped through the entire landscape scorching and killing trees but also rejuvenating every variety of brush and grass. Today, resplendent wildflowers bloom and weeds wield stinging spines, burrs, and thorns. Rattlesnakes warn us not to tread here and there. Rock encrusted ditches criss-cross the meadows exposed by run-off flooding. The Sespe runs alluringly through swim holes now choked with the gravel sloughed off fire-razed hills.

This did not stop Shelby, Hutton, Marco, Kelly, and Bradley from rushing up and down the creek bareback on their horses, their cries of joy and shrieks of terror echoing off the shale cliffs. They plunged through water holes, raced across sandflats, and extricated themselves and their horses from mudholes.

Our campsite under big Cottrell Oak enjoyed a natural spring, albeit one guarded by a jungle-like poison oak, nettles, thistle, and rusty old barbed wire lying in wait to tackle our ankles as we thrashed up to the rusted pipe that dripped a steady stream of spring water.

It was a hard-scrabble operation, but we had water, shade, and an old pen for our hard-working horses.

Conversation that evening turned to the next adventure at hand: the possibility of an evening ride from our meadow up to a hades landscape of hot springs and steaming pools, a place best visited in the cool of the evening given its 140 degree scalding waters sprouting from subterranean dungeons. 

But we were tired, and there were good reasons to stay put.

We could delight in Marco’s stories, or listen in amazement as Hutton and Shelby swallow air and then force it up through their larynxes, and they talked like, what?  robots? We could watch Kelly lose herself to paroxysms of uncontrolled laughter. We could learn (and I am not joking) some very cool and useful rope knots from Bradley, or we could watch Kelly tie Bradley in knots, rather than mount up and head off into the night.

Shelby, never one to miss a thing, says to me—decidedly tongue in cheek, mind you,  with that perpetual twinkle in her eye—“Well, Mr. Mulligan, will this trip to the Hot Springs make me happy?”

She was asking, in essence, “Okay. Can you guarantee me that if I saddle up Jim and head up this trail in the dark into the unknown, will it make me happy? And if it doesn’t, then my head of school friend, you have misled me. My well being, my happiness is in your hands. It is now up to you. Don’t screw this up.”

Of course, I did not take up the gauntlet Selby threw down, nor knowing Shelby, did she think I would so stoop.

She is too smart for this, but she is hardly above trying to put me over the barrel.

Because we all know the answer: no one is responsible for our happiness save ourselves. We cannot transfer our well being on to others; we can try, but we can’t actually give anyone else responsibility for our lives. It’s our own business only, and if we are unhappy, we truly have only ourselves to blame.

I told Shelby that all I could promise was adventure. As legendary Horse Program Director, Jess Kahle, always said, “When you go into the mountains, you don’t have to go looking for adventure; it will find you.” 

That was a sure thing.  That happiness thing, well, that was up to her.

So no promises except adventure, Shelby and Hutton, Marco and I, Kelly and Bradley saddled up as the low sun cast its pink aura over the far cliffs, and we loped out on the trail.

Naturally, adventure found us. Ducking branches and teetering across rips, we rode up from the oak forests into the far end of the canyon where steam rises out of the earth and rotten-egg odor wafts the nose; we stripped down to bathing suits and tipped-toed around cacti to cast a toe in enticing pools that were – dang near boiling.

Barefoot, and ever farther downstream in the evening darkness, avoiding sharp rocks and prickly cactus, we searched for that “just right spot” where the water was cool enough to soak.

Our horses were tied way back up the canyon, and we ambled precariously way down a stream that would have cooked us like tater tots in a friolater. 

We finally found the just right spot – a spot we had ridden right over 30 minutes earlier.

They were not pools exactly, but we found some small waterfalls that cascaded over us when we lay flat, and the hot water worked its healing way into our saddle sore muscles and bones.

As the water rolled off the rocks and washed across us, I glanced up stream to hear Shelby intone dreamily, hypnotized by the rolling hot water, “Okay, this is worth it.”

Understood, and fair enough. That hot luxurious soak was worth it, and of course it did make us all happy.

Joseph Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “The adventure of a hero is the adventure of being alive.”

We had embraced adventure, struggled to find the right spot, and were rewarded with nature’s hot springs.

We could have stayed back and camp and just hung out, but we chose the adventure of the unknown. It was living the adventure that was made us feel alive, and happiness was its by-product.

Last year, Joy and I toured the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and Robben Island off Capetown, SA.  We learned from a former political prisoner the story of Mandela’s conviction and 27 years of incarceration.  We saw Mandela’s small cement block cell, and the rock quarry that he labored in each day for years. We heard of the attempts of the Afrikaner guards to humiliate him and break his spirit by censoring his mail, limiting his communications with others, and cutting his food, sleep, and movement.

Mandela never relented.  He developed secret communications with his party members and family by hiding messages in shoes. He kept his morale intact by reminding himself each day of the righteousness of his cause and inviolability of his soul – something no prison wall or guard could touch.  He refused to turn his well being over to others.  He regarded his God given soul as beyond the touch of human cruelty. Each day he recited a short poem by English Poet, William Ernest Henly.

(Some background: Henly developed tuberculosis of the bone at age 12 and later had to have his leg cut off below the knee to stop the spreading of the disease. At the time he was only 20 years old. He wrote this poem in his senior year at Oxford entitled Invictus, which means “unconquered.”)

‘

 Mandela recited this each day.

Out of the night that covers me

Black at the Pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried about

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

The narrator paints a dark picture, seems unsure of a religious perspective, but nonetheless holds out a vision of hope: God has given us free will; we are responsible for our own well being, not others; we determine our happiness, our fate.

And this at once dark yet hopeful poem is what Mandela relied on each day as he faced deprivation.

This Victorian theme of self-reliance and stoicism in the face of suffering seems out of favor in our post-modern era of hailing the victim, but the poem has historical significance, and there is still much to be said for our taking responsibility for our own happiness and welfare.

Mandela credits this poem with saving his life. (And of course, Mandela later inspired the underdog SA rugby team to a championship with this poem as well, a story recently popularized in the film also entitled INVICTUS.)

Oscar Hammerstein, one of the greatest Broadway writers and musicians, (think now of Oklahoma, The King and I, South Pacific, The Sound of Music) also made an argument for the choice of happiness in the face of gloom and adversity. He once shared this with a radio audience this during the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War:

Why do I believe I am happy? Death has deprived me of many whom I loved. Dismal failure has followed many of my most earnest efforts. People have disappointed me. I have disappointed them. I have disappointed myself.

Further than this, I am aware that I live under a cloud of international hysteria. The cloud could burst, and a rain of atom bombs could destroy millions of lives, including my own. From all this evidence, could I not build up a strong case to prove why I am not happy at all? I could, but it would be a false picture, as false as if I were to describe a tree only as it looks in winter. I would be leaving out a list of people I love, who have not died. I would be leaving out an acknowledgement of the many successes that have sprouted among my many failures. I would be leaving out the blessing of good health, the joy of walking in the sunshine and the faith that the goodness in man will triumph eventually over the evil that causes war.

He concludes:

I don’t believe anyone can enjoy living in this world unless he can accept its imperfection. He must know and admit that he is imperfect, that all other mortals are imperfect, that it is childish to allow these imperfections to destroy all his hope and all his desire to live…

It would be folly for an individual to seek to do better—to do better than to go on in his own imperfect way, making mistakes, riding out the rough and bewildering, exciting and beautiful, storm of life until the day he dies.

I am reminded again of Joseph Campbell:

 “Your life is the fruit of your own doing, “ he writes. “You have no one to blame but yourself…the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are…the adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.”

So the next time friends ask you whether something you offer to them will make them happy, just don’t go there.

All any of us can promise each other is what life offers to us every day and every moment:

Adventure and ownership: It is your life. Choose it. Live it.

Remember Mandela’s affirming the inviolable sanctity of his own soul in the face of relentless incarceration.

Think of Hammerstein who exhorts us to go on in our own imperfect ways, making mistakes, riding out the rough and the bewildering, exciting and beautiful storm of life until the day we die.

Saddle your horse. Head out into the waning light. Ride the ridge, run through the brush and teeter across cliffs. Go with friends, find the water that is just right, and soak in it. Cry with the thistles, laugh with your friends. 

The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.

No excuses.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who we are.

Thank you all for the adventure we have shared this year. It has been a year of great spirit and significant achievement by students; it has also been a year of some great sadness from other perspectives. But it was our year, and we lived in it and grew with it together. We made our Thacher School. We embrace it and we move on, glad for what we have learned, happy for the opportunity to live fully.

Thank you.