Brentwood College School - Brentonian Yearbook (Mill Bay, British Columbia Canada)

Page 10 text:

You will make mistakes. Don ' t be afraid of making mistakes. There is nothing wrong with that: the only way I know of avoiding them is never to do anything. What is wrong is not admitting them and not learning from them. Look at every decision you make as a potential learning experience. The greatest crime is not to learn from our dec- isions, good or bad. Learning, as opposed to education, is something that goes on throughout our lives, and when we stop learning we are, to all intents and purposes, dead. Some of your decisions will be painful. Pain seems to be an essential ingredient in learning. Lessons that are learned easily are seldom very valuable. The real lessons are those that come with a high degree of discomfort. Those are the lessons you will remember throughout your life. Our first and most natural reaction to making a mistake is to blame someone or something else for it. It is difficult to be confronted with evidence of one ' s own fallibility. Pride, vanity, ego all make us want to blame our errors on someone else. It takes maturity and a deep personal security to be able to admit mistakes and to take the responsibil ity fo? trying to correct them. Your strength in this situation lies not in pointing fingers or calling for parents or organizations or governments to help, but in facing squarely the responsibility for the consequences of your own actions - in recognizing that solutions lie within you, and only you. Above all, preserve the ability to laugh at your self. H.L. Mencken once said; When a man laughs at himself, he loses a great many friends. They can never forgive the loss of their prerogative. All of these choices involve having a sense of values - of what is im- portant and what is not. Most of the really difficult choices involve moral judgements. Without a philosophy, without a sense of values and of what we stand for in life, we cannot make intelligent choices. We are like a rudderless ship which any wind will blow in another direction. And those who do have values, who know what they want, will be the ones who blow us back and forth. 6

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CHOICES In trying to prepare some remarks for this occasion, I was frankly making little headway until I discussed my problem with two of my children. Their response was: Why don ' t you write your talk as if it were a letter to us? Tell us what you would like us to know at graduation. And so here it is: my letter to my own children - I hope you will find it somehow relevant. Dear ChdHdrea: So today is graduation, a big moment for you and for all of us. It has always fascinated me that what we in North America call grad - uation - implying the completion or end of a step in life - is more generally known in Britain and Europe as commencement , the starting of something new. I suppose it depends on your point of view; my own preference is for the concept of a beginning rather than an end, a look ahead rather than a look back. Either way, it is an important time in your lives. Not so much for what you have learned, but for the choices you now have to make. Many of these choices - although they will not seem so at the time - will be irrevocable; your choice of a mate, of a career, of a place to live, of your interests in life. Once made, they will be difficult to unmake. And the longer you stay with them, the harder it becomes to turn back, to start over. Until now, most of your choices in life have been pretty easy. To a large extent, they have been made for you; where you live, how you live; the decision to come to Brentwood; your courses, your sports, your in- terests. They have been primarily the products of your environment, your parents, your friends, your home and to some extent your teachers. Increasingly now, you will be on your own. You will be confronted with a bewildering variety of choices. You will have to decide among them, and you will have to make many of these choices without any help. Some will be easy; others very hard. 5

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In these days of multi-million contracts for mediocre hockey, foot- ball or baseball players, it may seem old-fashioned to talk about working for a living. I must say, I find myself agreeing with Scottish theologian William Barclay when he says: No man can reach greatness without toil . The truth is that toil is the coin which pays for everything. It is a lesson we need to learn. We need to learn it in the social and the economic sphere. It is impossible to build up a stable society and a stable system without some kind of sacrifice. We are today living in a society where most people claim the right to be cushioned and insulated against all effort and all sacrifice. The aim is for more pay for shorter hours. Whenever the cost of living goes up, the cry is that wages, pay and salary should go up with it. The odd thing today is that people claim a right not so much to a living as a luxury. But the fact remains that no stable system of life or society can ever be built in any civilization where the element of sacrifice has been completely eliminated. To aim at luxury as a right is to end in disaster as a result. Your schools and we your parents, if we have done our job, will have prepared you to make these choices. We will have helped you to grow as an autonomous, free individual, capable of standing on your own, of making your own decisions, and of living with the consequences. We will not have helped you by making your decisions for you, by protecting you and sheltering you from the choices you must make in life, by leaving you unprepared to make your own value judgments and moral choices. Many of your group will leave school to become members of large organ- izations - universities, businesses, governments. Beware of falling into the trap of becoming an organization man. Organizations become all too easily a substitute for parents or for school - they make de cisions for you and protect you against mistakes. Never allow them to think for you; always question their goals, their motives, their values - think for your- self. Do not automatically accept the party line, and always exercise your gift to think, to question, to decide, and to learn. 7