Student Commencement Address Motion

By Myla van Lynde '23

Ihave this intense preoccupation with water, with its perpetuity and its course and its uncontrollable movements. Living so close to the ocean has left me with an appreciation for waves, for the early mornings and late nights when the surf takes on its own ungovernable presence. I am drawn to those transitory times, sunrise and sunset, when there is both gentleness and ferocity in the water’s movement. It is a comfortable rhythm, for the most part, but it is also terrifying. The waves do not hold back. Look at a fountain, a manmade apparatus that attempts to take control with layers of rock, but that must relinquish that control the second water comes out with protracted fluidity. Look too at how water flows out of a faucet, how it cascades and disregards intent by splashing all over the counter. There is no stagnancy here and no room for human definition. Water understands change instinctively because it is always in motion.

Summary is profoundly difficult. I hold words close to my heart, but still I find myself frustrated by the inadequacy of a sentence to express the fluctuating nature of reality. For instance, I could say: this class has spent the past four years here, attending Cate, completing high school. True, but not nearly true enough. Not enough because it does not include hours or white brick walls or when the amphitheater sometimes glows in the rain. Holding life close to your heart, the way we do at Cate, means that there are never enough words to clarify exactly what you mean. Still, since words are the best human measure of sincerity, we try our best to shape them into truth. Like water from a fountain, truth is perpetual, truth doubles back on itself. If you want to understand a moment, if you want to find its truth, I think you have to look at the motion of it. And there is motion everywhere at Cate.

For many of us, that first motion comes in the decision to leave home. I wonder how much we knew about this movement when we decided on it, this movement away that is also a movement towards. This is not a motion we take lightly – there is deliberation and careful thought. There is courage. It is a motion that means when we remember high school, we remember a life, not just a classroom. We remember avocados and passion fruit lining the side of the road. We remember walking on the railroad tracks in Carp and we remember lingering over dinner, dinner fading into study hours. The very first thought I had when arriving here, scribbled furiously on the first page of the notebook I bought in breathless volatile mythic anticipation of high school: I am so scared, but everyone here is brave and interesting and that inspires me.

This class moved together, at first, pressed close in circles on senior lawn, clinging to one another across campus. We sat far too many at round wooden tables every meal and we discovered each other. It seems to me that a group must first learn how to move together in order to find where personal motion might fit. The formation of a class is a delicate tension between individual and collective, between the parts and the harmonic whole. The Class of 2023, with our noticeable array of talents and propensities and identities, exemplifies this sort of equilibrium. We move together, still, but with the confidence that comes from having now discovered our separate selves. Though we lost some of our early years to the pandemic, we have managed to find our footing both separately and simultaneously. On a Sunday nearing the end of senior year, I swam in the Pacific and let the waves pull me under and then I came back up for air and ran down the beach to find my notebook so I could write: everyone here has something to say and that inspires me.

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that I return to whenever I consider moving on from something consequential. “Forever,” she believes, “is composed of Nows/ ‘Tis not a different time/ Except for Infiniteness/ And Latitude of Home.” By her definition, moving ahead means moving to the next now, the next singular infinity. We move up and move on because time waits for nobody. As seniors, we wonder about the permanence of home. If we cannot stay in a place we consider our home, then should we take comfort in the latitude of a second? Looking back, it is incredible to consider all the latitudes we have moved through over these four years.

Cate students hold specific, deliberative motion in our bones. A day here requires moving amidst Harkness tables, amidst sports fields and dorms, and of course that day is itself a movement through time. We push ourselves to consider perspective, to move from one thought to the next. In conjunction, this is how we begin to shape truth. There is vibrancy in each of us and to share that means moving through every possible avenue of communication. We form connections through thought, through numbers, through discipline, through asking questions. I am not sure I will ever find myself in a place where curiosity is held in such high esteem. In the classroom, discussions move with intentional fluctuations. Tangents are appreciated, even celebrated as the essence of education. I think our Inquiry projects epitomize this spirit –the satisfaction of following an inkling to its natural conclusion and the mutual joy of creating something we are proud of. All of this is movement approaching an understanding of the world, and even if we never quite reach a conclusion, at least we are on our way.

I see conversation feeding connection feeding community – and what is all of this if not motion towards something greater than the self? To the Class of 2023, what an honor it has been to move together in this place.

Outside, it only takes watching a single soccer game to understand the tenacity of Cate motion. See swimmers stretching on the poolside or dancers keeping time in transit, lacrosse players on the field. Here, late afternoon sun paints everything a surreal shade of orange. See how we take to the mountains at the start of each year and stumble upon astonishing wilderness. See even the lip sync contests, those brazen cheers and spirit. The routine of physical movement is simple and elemental.

In physics, we learned that the acceleration of an object depends on its mass and the amount of force applied. I always wondered whether the same can be said about human life. If we are constantly accelerating, what keeps us in that state? Some combination of relationships and setting must make up that applied force. Somehow, influences and experiences must coincide to propel us onwards, and that propulsion is a force for good.

It is striking that so many of our traditions here are centered around gesture. Sunset ceremony is a commemoration of the connections we have been able to sustain in our time here, and this tribute comes in the form of action. A hug or a handshake is a concrete manifestation of a concept. If words are not enough to express the truth of belonging, then there is accuracy in these motions. Walking out of Servons speeches, we link arms and move out of the chapel, allowing our steps to align. We recognize the emotional journey we have completed through an actual journey. Indeed, even informal traditions find purpose through movement. When we leave assemblies, we coalesce into groups that form, drift, and re-form. Then, here is us reconvening. We are always organizing ourselves in one way or another.

And while our own movements are purposeful, there are forces in motion outside of our power. One such force is sound through space. Sound at Cate: idle small talk is interspersed with philosophical revelations at the lunch table. I wake to birdsong outside my window and fall asleep to diffused footsteps in the hallway. And music. Here, there is always music. We pass by the chapel during M Block accompanied by vestiges of violin or piano or electric guitar. We let our playlists mingle in dorms, in bathrooms while we brush our teeth together – I always thought it was a lovely thing to be able to hear the bass lines narrating your neighbor’s late-night musings. There is music, too, in coming home to a common room overflowing with easy laughter.

When I think of leaving this musical place, I think of memory, and when I think of memory, I think of pictures. Maybe years from now, high school will become film from our trip to Pyles or photo strips from that homecoming. There is an anticipatory nostalgia to the act of taking a picture, because in doing so, we say: this is something I want to remember, this is something I want to keep. Can we really keep it, though? Taking a photograph means trying to distill motion into stillness, which seems impossible.

In his short story “Blow-Up,”

Julio Cortázar tells the story of a man who becomes disillusioned with photography as a vehicle for memory. He writes of, “… life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it.” Where is this essential fraction? How can we parse it out among infinite other fractions? Cortázar turns life into sheet music, arguing that rhythm is indispensable. A photograph has the potential to hold the rhythm of life, but usually it falls short, landing somewhere in between measures or in a different melody altogether. If movement is the cadence that propels, it follows that most attempts to capture truth will throw us off beat. The rhythm of Cate, or of any place for that matter, is thus a sort of an enigma. Every revision leaves space for another, perfection left improbable. Try to stop time in a second and it moves on to the next while you are still stuck in the last. clatter of silverware on the table and tennis shoes on wood and comfortable chatter and wonder what it all adds up to. I see conversation feeding connection feeding community – and what is all of this if not motion towards something greater than the self? To the Class of 2023, what an honor it has been to move together in this place. this conjunction of meaning and setting? At this school, we look for the point at which imagination and reality overlap, the point at which the two can move as one. Every landscape moves. Sunsets outside Parsonage bleed into the sea and that is poetry in motion. Here are those years spent with our heads tilted back, eyes open, here is us letting in the sky. Here is the music of us atop the quiet, pulsing rhythm of our movements.

I like to keep lists of things I find in each place I visit, those nonmaterial things I cannot take with me when I leave. I am not sure exactly when this started, but now I have index cards in red ink and mental souvenirs. On my Cate School list, underlined and in bold: here, I have found people who have taught me how to think, who come from wildly different places, who remind me to stop and absorb the finite charm of a dandelion. And that is irreplaceable. Each of my classmates has taught me something – at every moment, inspiration is instinct. Beside these students, I have found intuition and wonder. Here, I have found home.

So then, perhaps it is best to stand still and watch the motion of life happen around us. Summary is not so difficult if we relinquish the need for absolute clarity, or if we let tranquility and motion coexist. To explore this, I sat in Booth Commons one morning and watched. A dining hall illustrates so perfectly the passage of time, and I stayed there because I was fascinated by the ebb and flow of the room. For those of you who have more time left at Cate, I urge you to look around at this precious movement. Look at the way we sit and how our body language mirrors the patterns of our speech. Listen to the

A home is a setting and a setting is a place, and place is where movement is cradled – every minute here is held fast in the folds between classrooms and walkways and memories. We might move through Cate as individuals, but it is this shared context, this definition of a Cate student, that allows us to be known as a particular whole. We travel together. Motion. In an essay entitled Drawing the Constellations, Rebecca Solnit notes, “So metaphors are, like constellations, navigational tools to travel by… They measure the route from here to there. The body of the beloved is a landscape, but landscape is also a body; each is traveled in terms of the other, and thus the world is knit together, with those constellating lines of imagination.”

Even metaphors are motion. Cate has the potential to be a metaphorical constellation, each of us a star wondering at the spaces in between. A metaphor is a landscape. A landscape is place and space and definition all at once. What else can we do in a place of learning but strive for

The motion of time creates a beautiful narrative confusion. Where are we now? Is it the same place we were four years ago, or have we ended up somewhere thoroughly different? No answers are definite and no answers are universal, but what is certain is that we have moved through these years and now find ourselves on the verge, on the precipice of personal revision. If change is a constant, then leaving is no more than the next motion in an immortal series. We know, however, that it means more. This final motion takes on a significance that is almost too large, as if our minds have outdone our bodies. That makes me think again of fountains and waves and eternity.

We are graduating and this is a motion laden with consequence. The essential fragment of leaving a place is here, now, when the Class of 2023 walks down the grass. We move onto the stage, in motion, in memory of all the motions we have completed during our time here. This setting holds that memory, and each of us holds a fragment of that memory. Each of us, in other words, holds a piece of our greater truth. That is the gift we have given to one another, that is the acceleration we have unanimously applied. Here, find brave and interesting souls who have coincided. See us coincide for a moment onstage, an action in direct representation of the way our minds have moved. Alongside memory, we hold pride in ourselves and pride in this school.

We have learned fiercely and permanently from our movements here and hope that those who follow will do the same. Thank you.