I am up early on Friday morning, 4:30ish, thinking about the start of the break, listening to the wind push down from the north. It’s cold, seven degrees outside. Some students have left already, the majority are leaving today, and a few will be around for holiday tournaments, finding their way home this weekend. In the early dark, with coffee and the dog on the sofa next to me, I look at the tree.
John Bouton (English, JV girls’ soccer, JV boys’ tennis) shared the following message with the community during Monday morning’s all-school assembly. Thank you, John, for modeling the vulnerability and courage we seek to instill in each of our student’s lives.
The holiday shopping experience has changed over the past decade. The days of wandering through shopping malls have been replaced with the ease of adding items to your Amazon cart, the promise of two-day shipping, and a purely transactional nature of consumption. In this transition, we have lost much of the meaningfulness associated with giving a gift to a loved one.
My default these days is to wish everyone a happy holiday. I want to be circumspect, want to honor the various celebrations that coincide with this time of year - Hanukkah, Las Posadas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa - I want to tread lightly. It happened last night at the holiday celebration in New London. There were close to 130 alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Proctor at the event at the Lake Sunapee Country Club, and amidst the good cheer and laughter and Proctor stories, holiday greetings rang out. “Happy Holidays” dominated.“Merry Christmas!” could be heard as well, but the preponderance were holiday greetings, and that’s got me thinking: to Christmas or not to Christmas?
As a coach, momentum is either your best friend or your worst enemy. If it’s your team making a run, you hear fans cheering, watch as players dial in their focus, adrenaline rushing. If your team is on the unfortunate end of momentum, you pray for a referee’s call to go in your favor, search for any stoppage of play, and then desperately call a timeout in hopes of allowing your team to regroup.
Campus is quiet, for the moment. No bikes or skateboards or scooters zooming down pathways. No laughter or chatter as students pass between classes. No rushing off to our next class, meeting, assembly, or practice. Faculty have plenty of grading to do as we wrap up Fall Term assessments, but we take a collective deep breath this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving with family and friends.
Browse the news and it does not take long to recognize the current struggle we have as a society to honor the humanity of the other. A culture of polarization encourages us to seek opportunities for division, to highlight our differences rather than the bonds we share as a human race. As powerful as these voices of despair feel, they pale in comparison to the joy we experience when we actually spend time playing alongside others. Today, we made a powerful step toward unity as we welcomed our friends from Special Olympics New Hampshire to Proctor’s sixth annual Special Olympics Fun Day.
We’re obsessed with sports. So many fans, so many teams, so many opportunities to lose oneself in a quarter, a half, or a period. I’m not saying that it is a bad thing, and truth be told it might be one of the few distractions that can push the dire din of news off to the side. At least temporarily. One can only imagine that having the Washington Nationals in the World Series is a good thing for D.C. How could the first two games played in Houston and won by the Nationals not bring needed distraction and cheer to the beltway region? It’s just the nature of the beast.
