Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered at the Williston Northampton School’s Senior Dinner on May 10, 2013, by English teacher and Writing Center director Sarah Sawyer.
Hi there! It’s so great to be standing up here speaking to you tonight. You all know that the only thing I love more than talking is giving advice, so I’m pretty excited to have the next hour or two to tell you how to live your life. It’s a dream come true! (Kidding, of course.) It is true, however, that my mother is here—really! She is! Right over there!—so you do have to be nice to me. Also, just as a side note, she’s a pretty wise lady, so those of you who have pressing questions should probably ask her: she’s like the Buddha. So Laura McCullagh, if you haven’t figured out where to go to college yet, now’s your chance.
I thought quite a bit about what to say to you tonight. I would like to say something that you’ll remember, maybe something that will make you laugh, or at least something that won’t make a giant hook appear to my left and drag me off the stage. I thought about reading you a profound and beautiful poem, fitting for this big occasion, but then I remembered that Mairead hates poetry, and I definitely don’t want to make her grumpy.
You’re all at such a weird moment in your lives—you’re neither here nor there—and I know (because I remember the feeling well) that most of the time you just want to throw in the towel and go tanning out on the turf, or maybe think a little bit more about the length of your prom dress. (You know who you are.) I know that your friends are a lot more important to you at this moment than finishing your AP English 12 assignment, and probably that’s as it should be. And while there are lots of lessons and words of wisdom that I can think of—most of which are entirely plagiarized from the aforementioned mother in the back—I really only want to say two things to you tonight. So here’s the first one:
BE KINDER THAN IS NECESSARY.
One of the pleasures of having children, besides the obvious delights of cleaning up ground-in cereal off of the floor of the dining hall and trying to make sure that Will doesn’t die on a skateboard—thanks, Miranda Gohh, for always wearing your helmet! You’re the best!—is that I get to reread the books that made me fall in love with reading, which as you all know is one of the great joys of my life. Do you all remember Charlotte’s Web? Or Make Way for Ducklings? The Giving Tree? To Kill a Mockingbird?
The great thing about these books is that even though you may never think of them as you sit in calculus or French class or play lacrosse on the fields, they are in there somewhere, living and breathing. What I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten the chance to revisit them as an adult is that they are all about the same thing: kindness.
Recently our family read a great book called Wonder by R. J. Palacio, about a fifth-grade boy named Auggie with a facial deformity who goes to school for the first time after being home-schooled for the majority of his childhood. Of course, he gets treated badly, and some kids stick up for him, others betray him, and others just ignore him because he makes them uncomfortable. The story is told through lots of different points of view, and is a really profound exploration of human flaws and, more importantly, human strength. At the end, the head of Auggie’s school gives a speech to their graduating class, much as I am doing now, and he quotes the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, who says,
“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.”
When you get older, as you’ve probably noticed, the stories are all about death, but for just one shining moment of our childhoods we get to read about kindness. And then, I think, we forget it for a little while, because here come Meursault, and Hamlet, and Iago. Here comes Holden Caulfield, and here comes Oedipus, characters who are so grim and sad and full of truth that they can seduce us into forgetting that rule of life.
I tell you all this because I have a secret to confess, which I can’t really get out of because my mother is here, like the honesty police: it is hard work for me to be kind. An example: when I was about seven years old, the age my sweet Anna is now, I got in a big old fight with my next-door-neighbor, Kim Kubacak. She was that neighbor that you love and hate at the same time: she had Barbies and Fruit Loops but she was also pretty annoying. So at any rate, we had a phone in our kitchen (our only phone, which I am sure is hard for all of you to imagine, since you are probably texting each other right this very minute. But I hope not!). Right off of the kitchen was my parents’ bedroom, which was a very scary, sacred place that you never entered except in times of illness or thunderstorms.
At this moment, seven years old, it never really occurred to me that anyone could be IN the bedroom. I pick up the phone, dial it, and say, “Hi, is Kimberly there?” She gets on the phone, and I say, “I HATE YOU” and hang up. I actually can feel, at this moment, the pure evil triumph I felt when I hung up that phone…right up until I heard my mother’s voice call me from the bedroom. “Sarah?” she said. “I just have one question. Are you being KIND or UNKIND?” Well, even for a seven-year-old, the answer to that one is kind of obvious.
So as you can see, that’s me. I’m no Jean-Gabriel, who last year amazed me when he dragged himself out of a hospital bed to take someone who was not even Kelly to the prom. I’m definitely not Kirstyn Kruse, who will happily spend hours playing with my children and makes Anna feel like she is one of the girls at dinner. I’m not Sebastian, who knits—knits!—scarves for his mother and grandmother every year at Christmas. I’m not Dillon, who found my kids’ scooter the other day and delivered it right away to my house. I’m not Matt Freire, who has given selflessly of his time and energy to your class this year. But I am lucky enough to be around all of you each day, and because I am a work in progress I can say that I am working to follow that rule of life, to be a little kinder than is necessary. Hopefully I’ve learned not to prank call anyone, anyway. Progress!
The fact that I get to be around you every day brings me to the second thing I want to tell you. Here it is:
DO YOUR WORK WITH LOVE.
You all know this when you see it, right? I can see it in the classroom when you all light up with joy when Alex Peng reveals his inmost thoughts (rare, but very special indeed), or when I spot Evan Jacobsen hitting his squash ball for the one-millionth time in his endless and inspiring quest for self-improvement. I see it in Laura Bowman’s rapturous writing about food on Cheftell, and I see it in Denison Marsland-Rello’s righteous bravery. I see it in Pankti’s study of Sanskrit and in the work the hockey teams have done to raise money for cancer research. I see it in Jilly Lim’s amazing videos and in Devon Greenwood’s speed.
But I also see it every day in far less public ways: when you help some snot-nosed child (probably mine) use those pesky tongs in the dining hall, or when you laugh at my jokes (Brian Hendery, bless you). I see it when you take the time to add your humor to our days together—Andy Pierce and Nick Kioussis, you have both made me laugh so hard that I cried—and if you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Max Risch’s story about peeing in his pants on the baseball field, you’re truly missing out, because although it doesn’t end well for poor little Max, he tells his story generously, and, I think, with love.
You may have noticed that you all have little postcards of the Grinch on your tables, plus some fabulous pencils that I ordered for you. (Never say I never gave you anything!) When I was thinking about what I wanted to tell you, the image of the Grinch that you see in front of you kept popping into my head. Maybe you don’t know the story, so here’s the relevant part: the Grinch is mean, he steals presents, he’s very Grinch-y, and at the end of the story he becomes…kind! And as a consequence, his heart grows. It actually breaks open a little metal cage inside his body—sproing!—and gets bigger. (“They say that his heart grew three sizes that day.”)
I love this story, not just because of the fact that the Grinch becomes kinder, but because when he is kinder he is also stronger. He is more powerful. He gains the strength to do his real job—not stealing, but delivering all of those packages back to the Whos in Whoville with love. Of course, the Grinch is not a real person. He’s not complicated; he has no past. He’s not even a complex literary character: Hamlet and the Grinch don’t even belong in the same universe. But, at the end of the day, we would probably rather be standing victorious at the top of a mountain, adrenaline pumping, like the Grinch, than lying on the stage in a pool of blood.
So, perhaps we can learn from these simple, first stories that live in our bones. The Grinch and his childhood companions teach us that the two go together: being kinder than is necessary and doing your work with love. You have to be kind to gain strength, and you need strength to do your work with love, or in other words, to give your presents of speed, smarts, humor, art, diligence, courage, or anything else you have to the world. You have to GIVE so that you don’t end up on the stage in a pool of blood, or wandering around with your eyes stabbed out (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Maybe you can do one last assignment for me tonight: maybe you can take your Grinch postcard and write something kind on it. You can write to your roommate, or your favorite teacher, or maybe someone you have never thanked when you should have: the person who made sure that you didn’t get lost on your first day here, the person who makes you eggs every morning, or the person who plants the beautiful flowers we all enjoy. You can put your notes in this box right here and I will deliver them. (You never know: maybe you will get one in return!) This will be a tiny act of kindness, a tiny act of love, that will start us off on the right path.
So here’s what the Grinch figured out, and many of you have too: when you leave Williston and go off into the delights of college and then to the somewhat alarming world of adulthood, you will have a lot of choices, whether or not it feels like it. You will, at times, not have any idea how you ended up where you are, much like I am pleasantly surprised to be standing here tonight. But while, in a sense, it matters very little what you do, it matters deeply how you do it. You may decide, for example, to be a doctor. Be kinder than is necessary. You may be a lawyer. Do your work with love. You may be a mother, a father, a fortune-teller, a construction worker. Be kinder than is necessary. If you are a teacher, it will be easy: do your work with love.
Thank you all for your good-humor and attention tonight: I really look forward to seeing you at graduation, and I wish you a life full of heart-bursting, Grinch-y moments.