“At your young age, you’ve done something that only a tiny, tiny per cent of people in the world have done or ever will do.

You’ve hiked the Andes, the Atlas, the Appalachians, the Himalayas. You’ve been to the top of Africa and up to the Great Wall.

You swam in the earth’s great waters: two sides of the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, the Black Sea and the Med, the Amazon, the glacier lakes of Patagonia, and on a few rooftop pools when they were open.

You’ve kayaked in the Hudson river, in the low country of the Carolinas, and in the lakes of Shanghai.

You’ve been to the Sahara and to the high plains of Inner Mongolia.

You’ve surfed in Sri Lanka, skied in Kashmir.

You’ve watched tigers in the wild, been alongside sea turtles, elephants, dolphins.

You’ve been on the streets and in the alleyways and hutongs of the world’s great cities:

Shenzhen and Silicon Valley,

Mumbai and Shanghai,

London and LA,

Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires,

Rome and Rio,

Mexico City and São Paulo and Istanbul,

New York and New Delhi.

You’ve heard from 145 Morning Program speakers and hundreds of others in Fellowships and special outings. Authors, artists, politicians, entrepreneurs, advocates. With all of them you rubbed up against something: excellence, commitment to cause, caring about what they do. As one of you wrote this morning, you now believe everything is possible.

You’ve ridden on and in every imaginable form of transport. Camels, llamas, horses . . . . On one another’s backs. Riverboats. 6 of you in a Tuk tuk, in $2 and $20 Ubers. On the trains of Africa, on the high speed rail of China, and on the horror of America’s Amtrack. And oh, will you ever forget, in so many buses.

You’ve met ballerinas in Paris, sat on the floor at Martha Graham, danced in Seville, danced on your beds, and watched the intricate hand gestures of a Bharatnatyam dancer.

You’ve listened to Jazz in New Orleans. You’ve been sung to by opera leads and folk singers. You never stopped singing, even when the front desk asked you to.

You’ve done laundry on five continents.

You’ve made films, written books, created songs, poems, and postcards, advanced your drawing or your painting, started companies and NGO’s, launched magazines, made yearbooks.

You’ve been in the world’s great museums, parks, theatres, companies, factories.

You’ve looked up in the great cathedrals and mosques of the world and lowered your head in modest everyday places of worship on a Paris side street.

You’ve been on great campuses . . . Oxford, Stanford, Tsinghua and some of the budding, innovative ones, like Tetr in Delhi.

You prepared your hundreds of college applications and any school would be proud of your collective results.

You’ve been shown around their countries by your fellow Scholars, invited to their homes on the weekend and at break.”

This was just the beginning of Chris Whittle's speech to Baret’s first graduating class at The Great Wall of China.

Here he attended to their external journey, the people they met, the leaders they discoursed with, and their variegated accomplishments. But Chris also brought the discoveries they made internally to the fore, discoveries which were inextricably linked to their travels.

Out of the tempering of a year spent journeying around the globe, they have forged lifetime friendships and connections that will serve them as they continue to grow and shape the world, and a sense of how to abide in freedom:

"In a way. . . That’s what we hoped for you here at Baret. . . That you would surrender yourself, go with the flow, relinquish control for a while, leave the old order behind, be swept away.

That, for a year, you would be free. Not just taste it, but drink from a firehose of freedom.

In your case, you all jumped into the river together. A hundred heads bobbing along, chatting all the way, watching the world go by.

Your internal journey has been aided by your togetherness. The conversation in your head has been supported by one endless conversation with your mates.”

We know this conversation will continue for years to come, and we cannot wait to see what dreams and ideas are born of it. Our inaugural class of scholars are already poets, entrepreneurs, lawyers, filmmakers, and so much more. Their journey, from New York to Beijing, is just the beginning of a larger journey that will last a lifetime. And late in life, they will be able to look back on this year as a beginning of beginnings, a series of pivotal moments that shaped who they are and taught them how to value their agency, their freedom, and their friendships. As T.S. Eliot might put it, In their end is their beginning.

Congratulations to all of our Scholars on completing their best year yet!

If you want to learn more about our Scholar’s internal journey, the entirety of Chris’s speech can be found here.