THE CONCEPT OF TIME

TrinityPawlingHeadmaster

“Time is one of the constants of life. At Trinity-Pawling, time has been a commodity for you. You have, because the School has asked you to, packed a tremendous amount of growth into a finite amount of time. It is likely that, for most of you, time will never be as structured as it has been for you at Trinity-Pawling.

Yet, the structure of time will still be a constant in your life. It will be structured around further education, a career or careers, a family, and, perhaps, children. How you use this time will be influenced, in some measure, by what you have learned during your time at Trinity-Pawling. Will you be accountable to your self, to others, and to your responsibilities? Will you work hard with the time you have at a given task? Will you take the time to learn from the mistakes that you will inevitably make in your life? Will you invest time in your self, in your God-given gifts and talents? Will you spend time helping others? Will you regard time as a gift to be treasured in life?

As you move through your lives, you will begin to have a different understanding of time. It happens as you get older; trust me. Some years from now, I suspect many of you will look back at your time at Trinity-Pawling as a time with relatively few responsibilities. Some years from now, many of you will think that this time flew by. You will think about time spent with your friends, your brothers.  You will spend time in your future thinking about this time here.

You probably won’t remember how much time you spent eating chicken in the dining hall; or that assignment that you may now think was not fairly graded; or how tired you were on a given day because of how much you had going on; or how adults got on you to do this or to do that. You really won’t remember the specifics of this type of time. Rather, for many of you these moments in time will be crystallized together and you will likely attach different meaning to these experiences. You might even find that this meaning, as you reflect on it at some future years, really was learning.”​     – William W. Taylor, excerpt from 2016 Commencement speech