TOAD Talk: Miguel Wise

Hello everyone! I’m Mr. Wise, and as many of you know I am a second year Fisher Fellow here at Thacher. In a manner not entirely different from how all of you are at Thacher in order to learn, collaborate, and grow, I’m also here for my own education.

As such, when I realized that my TOAD talk was coming up, and with my two-year fellowship coming to a close, I realized that this was a great opportunity to reflect on what I have learned from Thacher. Some of these lessons come to mind very quickly. For example:

 

Believe it or not, there are some richer lessons that I’ve learned from Thacher. A few weeks ago, while wrestling with this very question, I took part in a very thoughtful conversation with some students and another faculty member. The question at hand was whether or not these students were glad that they made the choice to go to Thacher. The answer was “Yes,” and what made this conversation interesting to me was the question of why.

Thacher is a place of abundance. In how many other schools do you have 100 horses, a near-endless supply of good food, the whole of the Los Padres National Forest as your backyard, a deep and rich community of teachers and other adults, free Dance Dance Revolution in the Commons, your friends around you at all times, and all the cool stuff in Gates?

What these students thoughtfully shared was that they appreciated Thacher most, not for its abundance, but rather because it does not offer them the chance to disengage, the chance to renege on their promise of taking charge of and dedicating themselves to their own growth.

This fall I served as an assistant coach for cross country. I arrived there with no cross country experience or even track experience. I had been running for the sake of my health for the past few years, but not with any idea of what I was doing.

There I was assistant coaching cross country at Thacher, on an actual team, with real, non-stupid goals, and following all of these seasoned runners up and down the hills, sprinting around the track, etc. etc. Cross country has a lot of highlights, but when you are miles in and you’ve repeated the same hills again and again, and it’s hot, and Doc D. is showing no signs of letting up, the focus isn't on what magical offerings cross country can give you. It’s about what you can produce from your own body, or if that’s faltering, from some deep spirit in yourself and the ones who are sharing your struggle. 

It’s there that the vision of Thacher as a space that offers growth through renunciation, what I had been hearing in conversation with those students, stands most clearly and prominently in my memory. What’s lost in comfort, what’s lost in your momentary physical capacity, what’s lost in your ability to have been spending that afternoon in truly any other manner, is gained by your ability to provide complete focus on the activity. I want to thank all of the cross country team for helping bring that lesson home to me.

There’s one last point I want to make, however. If I ended this talk simply saying “learn to give up on everything except your singular goal,” not only would this be a major bummer, what it would also very much not be what I want you to take away from this talk. Focus does not require full renunciation. In fact, it goes hand in hand with a deep engagement with the world.

So to finish off, I want to bring us back to last year when John Muir Laws came to campus and he brought some of us on a walk and we searched for little insects in the creek and Doc Swift’s daughter, Annika, taught me more about birds than I thought was ever possible. We shut out everything beyond what was part of our world right then and there and explored through the small details of the natural world. Focused engagement with ourselves, our own practices and our position and space in the world is at the core of engaging with what’s beyond us. I want to bring us back to the core of Law’s lesson. Love, he said, is sustained, compassionate attention. 

When I was listening to those students talk about how Thacher is offering something in its limitations, I really do feel that it was offering a vision of love, just as the perilous run up Thacher Road is an act of love. There is an infinite world that exists within any space that is worth bringing into your lives. All of you are giving something up in coming to this school. There’s time with family and friends back home. There’s a sense of identity that’s wrapped around the people, places, and institutions that had served as your bedrock before taking a leap into this new institution. There’s the millions of other lives that you could have had in totally different contexts. 

These are real sacrifices, and these are also the sorts of decisions and sacrifices that you will make for the rest of your lives. Here at Thacher, just as we made decisions to come to here to focus on being the best versions of ourselves, and all of you make the decision to push yourself past discomfort in the classroom, on the sports field, in the barns, and in the dorms, this ability to focus on what you have, and what matters to you, and the community you make, is a beautiful luxury. By supporting each other in focusing on what is best in ourselves, our actions, our peers, and our surroundings, we create the attention needed to foster those acts of love.