Last week we hosted one of my favorite events of the year: Spring Family Weekend. It’s an honor to have our families come visit us in Pike – we are not exactly conveniently located. Many folks had to take time off from work, coordinate child or pet care, take planes, trains, or automobiles, book hotels. It’s a lot. Why do families do all this?
While there are a lot of different factors at play, there is one fundamental reason that all of us make the effort to be right here in this room: To connect.
Connection is everything.
Fundamentally, on an evolutionary level, humans are built to connect with one another. Our success as a species is a direct result of our social-ness. It’s a big part of why our brains are huge, why we developed speech, why our faces have something like 40 separate muscles capable of creating thousands of unique facial expressions. Our bodies and brains are literally built to allow us to connect.
While it has always been true that connection is what being human is all about, we are living in a remarkable moment in human history. We have forged incredible technologies to connect us across any geographic distance. And yet, the unfortunate reality is that the technologies developed to connect us often seem to have the opposite effect, echoing our own thoughts back to us and highlighting the divisions between us. We can connect across oceans but not across ideological distance.
So we are in this moment where connection is both easier than ever—and harder than ever. In this moment in time, I believe it is a moral imperative to connect. With curiosity. With compassion.
If we need one more reason to devote ourselves to connection, beyond it being fundamental to our humanity, and essential to the well-being of our society, there’s another urgency toward connection that’s shared by everyone in the Oliverian community.
Adolescence. That beautiful, chaotic, terrifying period that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Each adolescent is figuring out who they are as an individual—and what the ramifications of that are for all of the relationships in their lives. Most profoundly, the relationship between an adolescent and their parent is being turned upside down. The push and pull of growing independence and ongoing need is wildly difficult to navigate. The movement out of one kind of power dynamic into something that starts to look more like a relationship between adults is tremendously difficult.
To use the analogy shared by an Oliverian parent during our Spring Family Weekend, connection is both the glue that holds families together through adolescence, and it is also the oil that eases the inevitable friction.
Connection through curiosity about one another.
Connection through shared experience.
Connection through time and attention.
Connection, after all, is everything.
— Abby Hood, Head of School
