I walk in, somewhat abruptly, to the auditorium. The stage is filled with small human beings, namely fifth graders, singing the song I sang seven years ago, the song that I’m sure fifth graders will be singing seven years from now, assuming nothing scandalous is found in the lyrics or composer’s background.

A group of fifth grade teachers stands in the corner, chatting about the social metamorphosis that takes place as girls and boys start mingling, the complications that arise, and I feel something that’s eerily between laughter and nausea. I shrug it off and proceed to ask about my role in this performance: to sit in the back of the fifth grade dubbing ceremony, ready to do some spoof with Dan Frank, where I pretend to translate some Parker motto into Latin.

I can see Frank’s joy, a sort of visceral feeling in his face, as he walks me through it. That feeling seems to echo how I felt as a fourth grader as County Fair approached, or how I felt as a Middle Schooler relishing picnics on the field for Class Day. Yet now, as my time at Parker comes to a gradual end, I cannot help but ask whether the aggregate of all those feelings, how I’ve felt a special connection to this institution through tradition, ever really amounted to anything.

Clearly, those moments of tradition––of some ineffable pride in our institution and in ourselves––is a good selling point for admissions that also fosters very real joy in the moment, especially for younger students.  They bring back memories of simpler, joyous times.

But this orientation towards traditions has gone too far: all these traditions make us think in terms of rituals––specific exercises––to the point where the ritual itself eclipses what the ritual is meant to be.

County Fair, for example, has become too cluttered, to the point that the pageantry–logistical angst, where we are doing stuff, from posters, to hectic videos, to too many goods than any Lower Schoolers can fathom, just because it has to be done–has overtaken the core of the idea: the community coming together. This makes what started out as a valuable tool simply a task.  Count Fair is out of touch with its essence.

The same is true with Cookies.  It started out as a pure manifestation of teachers and students relishing in non-curricular learning. Now there are trips, months of scrambling, excuses to do the silliest exercises under the guise of education, and Cookies, like other traditions, is simply a thing that we have to do.

And these traditions ultimately are distracting. They make us conceptualize community through the lens of continuity, in the sense of doing stuff over and over, which seems fundamentally out of touch with a world with increasingly less continuity. Moreover, these traditions often feel like an act.  We all are to act like we love this school, which while loveable, isn’t great for all of us.

For someone like me, in his 14th year here, these traditions often times are a painful reminder of continuity. They make me feel stunted.  That despite all my growth, I still fundamentally am in the same place where I was as a four year old. I am not a four year old, and in some sense, even four year olds sitting in the auditorium during Corinthians MX are not even four year olds. They, like all of us, are just props, like all of us, in a play that seems to never end, and we are all the audience of the exhausted.