Travel and Thanksgiving

Craig Gemmell

Nov 22 2019

Something about fall in schools has always led me to refocus after summer and all the distractions it offers. This fall my eyes have done gymnastics. One moment I'm zoomed into the here-and-now of students and teachers and families in situ, that is, in Wolfeboro and, more particularly, the interpersonal landscapes that give definition to Brewster. The next moment I'm in and out of planes, trains, automobiles, dashing about the broader world—to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—only to return home again a bit discombobulated. Why the bi-focal life? This is a question that I've tangled with as I wistfully remember those great falls over the last 30 years when my car didn't move for weeks at a time as I worked and lived in place. I am, after all, a homebody.

I travel out of necessity. I need to visit with families and consultants, need to see where students come from in order to make Brewster more home-like for our students, who come from approximately two dozen states and as many countries. I need to meet with prospective students, whose parents want to meet the person into whose hands they will place their children. And I need to meet with donors, who have the capacity to support our dreams.

I bring a scrappy blue notebook with me when I travel and take it out when I'm in transit or in the hotel and, say, sleepless in Santiago or overtired in Oman. In it, I keep my lists: students I'm concerned about, calls to parents I need to return, to-dos for the various strategic initiatives we're working on, and my passing observations and thoughts. This notebook keeps me grounded. Not only does it help me remember what’s next, what I need to do, the tasks at hand, but also, it reminds me of what I am missing—the chance conversations with students and colleagues, the laughs, the joy. This tattered blue notebook keeps me connected to it all.

In a moment of sleeplessness on a transatlantic redeye last month, I opened to a clean page and started writing some observations I’d been making on the road—the sort of insight I’d lose in the shuffle if I didn’t jot it down.

Sitting at my kitchen table early this morning, I happened upon that list. Among observations about traffic behavior as an indication of cultural norms, I spied this malformed thought that I had scribbled: “T.S. Eliot was wrong.” These are the lines from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” that were on my mind:

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wrong? Wrong might be too, well, too strong.

Eliot’s notion is, at least to me, incomplete. Incomplete, in part, because the technology of the 21st century means that as I race around the globe my data keeps streaming into my devices and thus into me at all hours. While I watch the sunrise in Hanoi and imagine the sun setting over Wolfeboro Bay, I know the day’s game scores, what is for dinner at Esta, who has gotten into trouble, and who needs to talk. And talk I do—in the darnedest places, in airports and cabs, hotel lobbies, and on the bustling streets of Manhattan.

Eliot was exploring a bit of a paradox. He was thinking about how our exploration beyond ourselves allows us to see ourselves and our familiar surroundings with new lens. The time I spend traveling for Brewster offers me another kind of paradox; that is, as a result of being distant from Brewster, I come to know it more deeply—a doubling down of knowing, a deepening, not a newness. I think of the kids who have parents in tempestuous Hong Kong and realize, as I move with trepidation through the airport, how our kids must harbor worry. I think of our Japanese kids as I move through the hyper-ordered streets of Tokyo and how America, and Brewster more narrowly, must feel so unruly to them. And after being hosted in Oman for the first time, I realize both how Omayma and Rahaf’s graciousness is not an accident and how we need always to reciprocate in kind.

I think also of my immensely provincial childhood and of the grace that has come as the world has opened itself up to me as a result of the travel I’ve done, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had in the process. Through all of this, my understanding as a leader has deepened. As I return from my travels, I know more fully that the work of Brewster—a community diverse in so many ways—is to enable young people to understand the other. In a fractured world, we seek to develop empathy in our students—that capacity, which, in itself, is an act of leadership and a way to leave a place better than we found it.

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I am grateful for so much: for our students, for all the adults who contribute in varied ways to shaping kids’ experiences at Brewster, for our parents who share their children and offer us their trust, for venturing abroad, for returning home, and for T.S. Eliot, who always gets me thinking. Let me leave you with the hope he offers in the final stanza of “Little Gidding:”

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well

Happy Thanksgiving!