Tag Archives: Life

Education

Commencement: Words on Friendship

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Over the weekend, I had the very great honour of being one of two teachers to give a speech at our class of 2025 graduation.

These were my words to these young people, and to young people everywhere:

Thank you for the honour of speaking to you today. A former colleague once told me that for a teacher, this is as good as it gets. I’d have to agree.

But the thing about giving a speech is that one must know what one wants to say. And, feeling rather like a student presented with a long-term writing task, I didn’t. So I did what many of the young people sitting before us have done in this situation, and, despite what I have told you all, either as your I&S teacher, psychology teacher, or EE Coordinator, I procrastinated. For months. Naturally, I collected ideas along the way, but the writing itself happened in a relatively short amount of time in a sort of self-imposed IA jail. Like I’ve been saying, we’re all in this together.

When I first met this group of young people in August 2021, it did not take long to realize that something very significant was afoot here. After a short time getting to know you in the classroom, we spent four nights together in the Thuringian Forest and by the time we came back I was convinced: This was a group of friends who bickered like siblings, deliberately pushed each other’s buttons, and loved each other in ways that demonstrate what love is – a verb.

Fast-forward to your trip to Munich in February of this year. Once again, I watched as you looked out for each other and spoke up for one another. Even in the moments when you split off into small groups, you kept track of everyone’s whereabouts and plans. You knew who had internalized a city map and who could find the best restaurants. You knew who had extra cash for transport tickets and who was running a few minutes late. In short, you cared about each other.

Care is a verb. Love is a verb. It’s not enough to call oneself a friend. One must act like a friend in order to be a friend. Many of you know my thoughts on social media, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that I believe “friend” is a word we throw around too often without thinking about what it really means. I like the description by poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot: “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart . . . knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

Friends look at our best qualities and forgive us the rest. They care about us enough to be honest, which helps us become better than we are. We need those people sometimes. And we need to be those people for others. Imagine what type of world we could live in if we acted with kindness, if we looked for the best in individuals, seeking to build one another up rather than tear each other down. In the family that is this class, you have experienced just that. My hope for you is that you continue to create that community wherever it is that you go next.

Friendship is, writes poet David Whyte, “the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

It is having and being a friend that allows us to navigate this complex world, one in which negativity frequently demands our attention and feeds off exactly that. The counter to this is the very real positivity and joy that we find in one another. These are our opportunities to love others, to care for them, and give our attention to those who deserve it. It is with one another that you have learned true friendship, an art that has shaped you and will stay with you. Some of the people beside you today will walk with you for years into the future. A beautiful thing about real friends is that they give us the courage to be ourselves. Be there for them and let them be there for you. For those who will let each other go after today, be gentle when you meet again, for these people, too, have shaped you as an individual.

Today marks a metamorphosis, the beginning of a new chapter in the journey of your individual life. It is as individuals that we are able to motivate, nurture, and challenge one another to be the best people that we can be. I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the very individual people that you are.

[Here followed a few words to each of my psychology students. My colleague spoke to the other half of the students, who had taken the business management course.]

Dear graduates, it has been a joy to observe your true friendships with each other, and the way you have embraced the individual that is each one of you. The world needs more people who are friends like you are.

Congratulations, Class of 2025. I can’t wait to see who you become.

Jena, Germany – April 2025
On My Mind

On Comparison

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That’s how it is because it’s always been that way. And because that’s how it is, and they know that’s how it is, they don’t need to explain. And because they don’t need to explain, they don’t talk about it, and that’s how it is.

Which makes it hard to explain because it means thinking about what it is. What it is.

And that’s what I lose when I’m away, and what I slip into when I’m back. It’s the pair of jeans that’s stiff for just a moment when first out of the wash but soon soften completely, fitting the contours of the body as a skin. It’s a flicker of unconscious observation that things are the way they always were before falling into a groove so deep that there’s nothing to see without a point of comparison.

Patterns are comfortable, easy, normal. Evolutionary, after all. Patterns have been expected for so long that there might be observations made but no questions asked, at least not out loud. It’s the changes that are questioned, the things that are no longer the way they were before, the things that are just different enough to seem jarringly out of place. And it’s only with comparison that we notice, the comparison brought by distance or time or the dramatic life events that have us seeing everything with different eyes.

I’ve slipped in and out of many skins and they snag sometimes, like the way leather boots rub the backs of heels used to the freedom of sandals. Sometimes a sweater deemed cozy in one environment is garish in another, or a favourite work dress is suddenly completely out of place. Sometimes the clash is obvious, and sometimes it takes a moment to put a finger on just what doesn’t fit. But once identified, it cannot be ignored. The broken zipper catches in all the wrong places and tugging it closed is an inconvenience that turns into irritation.

Late at night is usually the time when everything feels wrong, where the life chosen and celebrated is under the microscope of inquisition, its only fault being that its course is reality and its outcome unknown. (This is living, after all.) The life not chosen, the path not taken, is the one full of possibility and because nothing is known, anything is possible. The life chosen and experienced in medias res suddenly seems written to conclusion. The allure of the other choice is just that, allure, because we can neatly conclude everything when we know nothing. The mind spins patterns and the patterns reveal themselves in stories, compelling for their certainty despite the gossamer substance of dreams.

In the morning it’s easy to see the dreams for what they are, to dissolve the wisps into smoke and settle back down to earth. But what doesn’t go away, what never goes away, is the swell of questions that comes from the lofty heights of comparison. It’s easy to find fault with what there is when what there could be only exists through rose-coloured glasses. And it’s easy to forget that the forks in the road were once obscured with weeds, or that the signs were old and faded. It’s easy to forget that the choice was to walk through the open door because another door had closed. It’s easy to be nostalgic for what is no longer, and easy to fall for what never was and couldn’t be.

It’s having the courage to look forward instead of sideways, to go confidently while the world turns, that is somehow obscured late at night. To commit to what was chosen and to let that path shape itself around a body that has itself changed. The jeans might need to be let out or taken in, held up with suspenders or cut down into a purse, but the jeans shape themselves to the body they’re given; we either fully embrace where we are or run the risk of forgetting to live at all.

And because it always, always helps to remember, here I end with words borrowed:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost

Bad Herrenalb, Germany – February 2023

Germany

Work-Life Balance

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One of the reasons I left Asia for Europe was for a better work-life balance, but I admit to uncertainty over what that actually meant. I knew I was looking for something, but I couldn’t articulate precisely what it was. Nevertheless, stating this as a reason for moving in job interviews always led to vigorous nods. Clearly, the work-life balance in Europe was better – but what would that actually look like?

I have often found it hard to judge the amount of “work” I do in the different contexts in which I have taught, not only in terms of the country or age group of students, but also in terms of my career experience. I remember individual lessons taking hours to plan when I was a new teacher, a time commitment that decreased sharply with each lesson under my belt, but twelve years in, I still consistently find that marking a single essay takes about fifteen minutes. As it has been throughout my career, sometimes it is necessary to work late or at home, and sometimes this is a choice. I am juggling arguably more hats now than ever before, but also finding myself less bogged down by minutiae. And after a dozen years in this profession, I continue getting to school early enough to have 40 minutes of prep time before the students arrive – time to drink my coffee, read over my notes, clear my head, and time just in case.

So while I cannot say that my work habits have changed in this search for a better work-life balance, I have sensed a difference in how time is treated. Working in Singapore, the (un)spoken expectation was that people were busy all the time, including on the weekends. In Germany, despite how busy one might be during the week, weekends are a different time and they are meant to be enjoyed. This is not only clear from conversations with colleagues, but also through interactions with students. Rather than asking me if I’ll be available via email over school holidays, my current students ask if they can email me as questions arise and hurry to clarify that they are not expecting answers. I was profoundly touched the first time a student said, “It’s your holiday, too.”

Recently I’ve been talking with a friend about how people in German and American cultures spend leisure time. My American friends often refer to “being productive” or “adulting” (a term I loathe) and my German friends tend to speak in snapshots of specific moments rather than painting a general picture. Unlike when I lived in New York and felt under constant (and unaffordable) pressure to always do something, preferably something new, living in Germany has taught me that all days have something to enjoy, whether they are work days or weekend days. After all, the park is always pretty, even when cycling to work in the rain.

Something I’ve really noticed, however, might have more to do with living in a small town than living in Europe, though I’ve not lived in small towns elsewhere and this is my first time living in Europe. My work-life balance is doubtless better because it only takes me seven minutes to get to work by bike. A trip to the grocery store after school puts me in reach of all other stores I might want to visit, and I’m only five minutes from home. The minimization of commuting time is doubtless significant and provides much more flexibility during the day than I have previously experienced. I do miss certain aspects of life in a big city, but not enough to want to move back to one.

Before moving to Germany, I had a highly romanticized vision of living in Europe in mind: Sitting in the town square and drinking coffee, strolling along cobblestone streets, travelling by train and staring out the window at a green, rolling landscape. After over a year and a half here, I’ve learned that the picture wasn’t too far from accurate: We have cobblestone streets and four town squares, and I have spent time in all of them, sometimes with a coffee; travelling by train is indeed an opportunity to experience a lovely landscape, but also an exercise in patience with delays and missed connections; our park has featured much more in my life that I would have thought before moving here, and just as much as I knew it would upon seeing it for the first time.

While there are certain measurable differences in my daily life now compared to living in Asia, I think there is mostly a different feeling. The expectation of society is not that one works all the time, and the amount of work one does is not a measure of worth, whether self-imposed or through public pressure. This change in attitude has given me space to breathe, to rest, to relax. This is deemed normal, expected, and an important aspect of one’s life rather than a luxury or “waste of time”. There’s balance rather than constant motion, moderation rather than extremity. And perhaps this is what my interviewers with their vigorous nods knew about living in Europe – that I would not find just a work-life balance, but rather a different way of looking at life itself.

Schwarzwald (Black Forest) – February 2023