Head of School’s Notebook: Pacing and Pause
April 11, 2025
Last week, the pace on campus shifted.
We moved into April, and everything started to move faster. End-of-year projects, exams, planning for Commencement – all of it now feels just around the corner. My inbox is full of questions about the years ahead: 2026, 2027, 2028.
This time of year always comes with urgency. But it also calls for attention.
Recently, our campus listened to Tallulah Bates ’25 give her Servons speech, In Praise of Slowness. She spoke about yutori, a Japanese word she defined as spaciousness: making room in your life and your mind to actually absorb what’s happening, not just move through it. “I like the term spaciousness rather than slowness or laziness,” she said, “because it feels like an intention rather than a consequence.”
Her words have stayed with me. This is the time of year when intention matters most. When our calendars speed up, but our capacity doesn’t. And sometimes we need to remind ourselves—especially those of us who are wired to keep going—that we’re allowed to move through this season without rushing past it.
I’ve been getting back into running recently. As a former high school and college athlete, I’ve been programmed to believe that exercise is only “worth it” if it’s fast, arduous, and results-oriented. This time, I’m trying something different. There’s a training zone—Zone 2—where you go slow on purpose. You build endurance gradually. It doesn’t feel flashy, but it’s effective. A reminder that showing up with consistency, even in a lower gear, still counts, especially if you enjoy it.
As we hit pause on campus goings-on today for our annual Mesa Dinner celebration, I’ve been asked to say a few words about where we’re going as a school. And I will. But I find myself thinking just as much about where we are. Trying to find the right slow-on-purpose balance for this moment in the academic year.
This is the tension I hold daily as Head of School: to be here and also there – present in the daily rhythms of campus life, and also dreaming forward into Cate’s future, while carrying the lessons and commitments of our past. One part of my job is to lead. But another part, equally important, is to be here.
One of my favorite organizations, The Slowness Project, offers us such an invitation:
“In times of great haste, we dare to be slow. Not a mere shift in velocity but an altered state of being. We break cycles of distraction and destruction, opening deep chasms of reflection and space for energetic insight. Slowness defies conventions, embracing the imperfect, the strange and indigenous. Not the prettiest apple but the tastiest, the unaltered, the one that bends the branch.”
That’s what I hope we all make time for, even now, even here at April’s quickening pace. Because yes, there is much to do. But there is also much to feel. Much to notice. Much to learn, even in the pauses.
To our seniors and their families, especially: I hope you’re taking it in.
To all of us: permission to slow down, to be present, and to hold this moment before it becomes memory.