Our Final Closing Exercise

This past January, I took a winter class at Harvard called “Fugitive Negotiation,” which explored what it means to negotiate power, space, and purpose in our cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist world. While there was much unique to the soul-nourishing course, perhaps among its most thoughtful design were our daily intro and closing exercises, meant to ease us in and out of our collective thinking + feeling—to enter us into a different zone for social study and deliberately back out into the world. I can’t say I fully appreciated the value of doing so at the time, but the principle has remained in mind these past couple of months, as I’ve sat in the mind-body discomfort of the abrupt shift to distance learning. So now, as I turn to this week’s commencement “activities,” it seems felicitous to mentally ease myself out of my time at Harvard—to give myself some semblance of a closing exercise by putting words to an experience I still have yet to grasp.

While I was often loath to admit it, much of this year was marked by confusion. Directionless has never been a word I’ve considered using to describe myself so the discomfort was great and the moving target, frustrating. The more I learned and the more conversations in which I took part, the more questions I began to hold. Questions rethinking academia vs. practice, my evolving career interests, and whether coming to HGSE was the best decision. It took time—in class, in office hours, during walks to the i-lab, and long T rides downtown—to realize that that was okay, maybe even expected. That it was good to take time to deconstruct my mind and rebuild it with new knowledge and modes of thinking. Though my time at Harvard did eventually confirm some things for me, I am grateful for the reminder that questions beget questions, that it’s worthwhile to nurture curiosity, and that by being more open-minded to where it may lead me, I can take a more humble posture towards ideals of impact and to notions of social good.

I’m thankful to have come to that point of learning in partnership with those chasing their own curiosities and careers, too. With friends and colleagues so dedicated to social change. Friends who eagerly give up their time and comforts—material or otherwise—and who go to such great lengths not so much for what they want as they do for what is right. Classmates who are driven by visions of equity and justice that traverse time and place, and who articulate perspective with not only eloquence but also conviction. Colleagues with whom I could analyze issues of education, yes, but also complexities of identity, untold history, culture, and oppression, with gravity and intellect as well as imagination, hope, and grit.?

People at Harvard were far from perfect in many ways, but what a gift it was to study with those for whom education too stirs deep joy and utter resentment. Despite institutional issues and problematic spheres of privilege and pedagogy, HGSE held a community of people who looked critically at who was in our seats and who wasn’t. Of who we saw in positions of power, especially as it pertained to the elevation and erasure of narratives and freedom. It was these people—these friends, classmates, professors, and TFs—who, by way of their own questioning and curiosity, expanded not just my way of thinking but also my way of feeling and responding. I’ve always said that it’s a privilege to meet and know someone at any given point in their lives for however long your lives intersect, and I find that all the more true now. For you, all, I am grateful.?

When I think of commencement speeches, I think most of one, in particular, given by one of my classmates at my alma mater several years ago. She intro’d by acknowledging that there were two educations that we were honoring that day: the one that had earned us our degrees and the one that had taught us how to be human. Much of her speech was well applicable to the traditional four-year residential college experience we shared, but over the years, I’ve found it extends well beyond undergrad, too. This year in Cambridge was still the grounds for much learning in ways we often forget. Moments that collectively make up this shared process of learning how to be human: finite, in flux, and in need of grace.

For me, it happened in moments when I chose to press into hard conversations; when I chose to show up and to stay. Or times when I put my work down and phone away for friends in tough moments, and just listened. It happened when I learned to be more deliberate in how I spend my time or give my emotions, and in moments when I fell more in love, remembering what it’s like to have my heart pulled and stretched and made vulnerable again.?

I learned more how to human... when I made decisions, owned up to their implications, and chose to apologize. During my solo evening walks in the Common, feeling biting air in my lungs, and my heart in its early stages of healing. It happened when I had fun! It was in making time for long, unscheduled phone calls with my family, and it was in moments when I missed my dad and chose still to feel the ache whose roots only grow deeper and wider with time.?

We’re offered the choice to learn how to be human throughout the span of our lives, but it was special to have a set time and place to learn from others with whom mine wouldn’t have otherwise intersected. There was a shared humanness to witness apart from scholarship at Harvard and I think that, too, is worth acknowledging this week.

Among the most challenging facets of Commencement—more so than how odd and anticlimactic virtual ceremonies are—is how unfinished it all feels. There were no in-person goodbyes in March; the ending was jarring. But when I think back to the summer, I realize many of my classmates and I entered Harvard that way, too, bringing in whatever we had at the time—recent break-ups, broken hearts, halted conversations.. messy states of family affairs, health concerns, moving issues, all of it. There aren’t always clean demarcations of the domains and periods of our lives.?

It’s not to minimize the crisis the world is in, but I think we can hold all of that truth together: that it can feel weird and awkward to celebrate (inappropriate even, given what we’ve been seeing) and that it’s an education and achievement worth formally honoring. It had meaning. This learning—both in scholarship and in being human—endures in endeavoring to greater impact and purpose in tandem with the realities of life. I feel the weight of opportunity and privilege in saying that I am grateful for it all.