Notes On Gratitude For the Class of 2021
On Saturday, June 12th 2021, we graduated our Pioneer Class — the class with whom we founded The Stone Independent School. While many of those students have been with us for four years, their elected Class President Alex B’ was with us only for his senior year and because he was his perspective on Stone is a little different from other students. Today, we’re so happy to share with you Alex’s commencement address to his classmates — “Notes On Gratitude For the Class of 2021”.
Notes On Gratitude For the Class of 2021.
If you would have asked me two years ago, “What will high school graduation look like, Alex?” My answer would have been vastly different than it is today. I thought I’d be standing at a podium, with 360 classmates, all with four tickets to give to their family, and a sea of people packed into an overflow section.
But here I am, standing as the class president to a class of 25, in a park, for a school I didn’t even know about then.
I was fortunate to experience Stone for a shorter period of time than any of you and I laugh to myself thinking about the irony of what you could consider to be the least experienced student here talking to you about how great Stone is when I am only just starting to understand all of it. But I would argue the opposite: I may not know Stone best, but I see it the best. The Stone Independent School is going to change education and we are the Pioneer Class, the first graduating class to contain students who have fully attended here from 9th until 12th grade. After four years, we finally have our proof of concept. With students going to some of the best ranked universities in the nation, we beat the Scantron answer sheet model of school. I want you to actually stop and think for a minute. We go to an amazing school. Likely one of the best in the entire country and we are rewriting the way education is done. In 10 years, Stone will be a blueprint for the next wave of education. Real education. We go to a place where we are expected to have opinion, where we are trusted deeply, where we collaborate daily in ways other students could only dream of. We drive vans across the country, and we play the Pixies in between classes. We form rock bands and we create rock concerts from nothing. We are changing the world, each and every day. When these monumental things are happening around you every single day, they sometimes lose their shimmer.
That's why today, I am here to talk to you about the importance of gratitude.
I’m sure everyone here today is familiar with that weird, hard-to-place feeling that things are just not as they should be. The feeling you get when everything seems to be crumbling down around you. It feels like something is pushing down on your chest and you get anxious about any number of things. Maybe it is that you're not good enough, your relationships are not successful enough, or that you don’t have the things you want — a chronic dissatisfaction that makes you look outwards with envy and inwards with disappointment. Pop culture, advertising, and social media all make this even worse by telling us that aiming for anything less than your dream job is failure. We feel like we need to have great experiences constantly, we must be conventionally attractive, we must have lots of friends and find our soulmate. Building upon that, the feeling that others have all these things and are truly happy. And to make matters worse, a vast array of self improvement products, stories on the news and on our phones, tell us it's our fault and that we aren't working hard enough to improve ourselves.
In the past 20 years, researchers have started looking into how we can counter these negative impulses. Scientists began to ask, “Why are some people more happy than others, and what can we learn that might help?” The conclusion they came to was that the antidote to dissatisfaction was gratitude. While it might sound like another self help trend used by hashtag-loving fitness influencers, it's far from it. Scientists found that gratitude stimulates the pathways in your brain involved with feelings of reward, forming social bonds and interpreting others intentions and it makes it easier to save and retrieve positive memories. It also directly counteracts feelings like envy, social comparison, narcissism, and materialism. As a consequence, people who are grateful, no matter what for, tend to be happier and more satisfied, have better relationships, have an easier time making friends, get better sleep, suffer less from addiction, and are better equipped at processing trauma.
In a nutshell, gratitude refocuses your attention to the good things you have, and the results of this are more positive experiences and better feelings.
As this final week at Stone came to a close, one thought kept hitting me.
Stone is the first place in my entire life where I have felt safe.
If I had to choose one thing to be grateful for during my time at Stone, it would easily be the people. For the 24 students sitting in front of me right now, who constantly challenged me to be the best person I could. And for the other 100+ other unique, caring, and thoughtful students. 480 New Holland Avenue will always have a special place in my heart — but not because of the exposed beams and the industrial railings, but because of the conversations with my peers and my teachers: about the nature of how history is recorded, or literary theory, or the time Lou and I debated the ethicality of eugenics. Every once and a while, I take a step back and remark about the fact that I, as a teenager, am discussing with another teenager systemic racism and how poverty is the most important social justice issue we need to address in this country, because it's fundamental to all the rest. Stone is not a building, it is a group of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I ever have been blessed to meet. Stone is the school where I felt not only safe, but normal. Stone is what I am most grateful for. As someone who spent kindergarten through 11th grade in a very different environment, I can tell you that what we have at Stone is unparalleled.
And what we have at Stone is each of you.
Thank you all for letting me into your life, even if it was just a year. Because of each and every one of you, I am blessed beyond measure. If gratitude is the answer to having more genuine happiness, all of you are what I am most grateful for.
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