Eight months ago, you circled around these campfires in the mountains of New Hampshire, and you began.

Can you remember who you sat beside on the bus up to orientation at Eagle Mountain?

This year, in just 24 hours, will be an indelible, dreamlike part of all of your past, and the past of all of you collectively as well. It's been part epic journey, part rolling party, part lecture, part love story that you've all been through together.

At the very core of Baret is the idea that one learns best from experiencing something, and making, and touching, and talking, and tasting, hearing, smelling, that those things do more for you than any textbook, or any book, or any talking at you, as I'm doing right now, can do. So I thought back over your year and looked at what you've done, and also some things that you may have learned collectively.

You, and this is the collective you, you saw your first snow.

You took your first hike.

You breathed great air, awful air, thin air.

You climbed the Andes, the Atlas, the Appalachians, the Alps, the top of Africa, the Himalayas.

You've been in and on the Earth's great rivers, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Yangtze. You've seen the waters and heard about the ones we've already lost.

You dove into two sides of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic, as well as the Med, the Black Sea, and the South China Sea, which surrounds us here. You cleaned up garbage washed on the beaches of those great bodies of water.

You experienced more in your personal side trips than your peers are likely to experience in their lives. Chongqing and Qingdao, Xi'an, Tbilisi, Rio, Rishikesh, Agra, the Bund, and Chengdu, are just examples of where you went.

You've seen dance in Seville. You've seen capoeira used as secret rebellion.

You've saved some sea turtles.

You heard Indian music at someone's home. You listened to the calls of prayer in Istanbul from your hotel window, which I loved every day.

You've ridden horses, camels, llamas, donkeys.

You've crashed on one another's beds. You've seen room service by robots, fast food by aerial drones.

You've made pasta in Italy.

You and your families have been host, and you've been hosted.

You've seen the pride of students presenting their countries and their continents to you.

You now know, as Sofia said yesterday, a strong passport is an accident at birth, and that visas are not blind to race. You've felt the speed — and you've experienced the bumps — of buses, trams, subways, and taxis all around the world.

You've rubbed up, in my view, against the essence of some of the world's great cultures.

And then finally, you've seen and felt that everywhere there are good and kind people like yourselves. Those who found our passports or our phones and brought them back, those who made our beds, did our laundry, served our meals, those who guided us up mountains or downriver.

You laughed. You argued about things and shaped one another's ideas in doing that.

You took people home at break. You cared for one another. And most important, you cared for those of you who might not have experienced that kind of care before.

You gave one another second chances.

You imagined your trips and you made them happen. I could go on. That's just the tenth of it, if you will, and wasn't that a year?

You summited together and you cried together. And you're going to cry again tomorrow when you board that final bus.

And the collective you, which you all created together will never be again like it was this year.

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What you've experienced this year was educational intimacy. You felt a caring, human, intimate ecosystem at Baret. And we designed it that way. And yes, as you part, that's going to go away in one regard. But we hope, and I hope, that you'll go recreate this in your future lives. And you've used the phrase often: we all have to find our people.

But I don't want you to just find your people. I want you to find organizations that expand your people and recreate in many ways what you felt and learned here.

The challenge is to recreate ecosystems like ours that are as emotionally supportive as Baret. And you can — you may not be able to do that immediately, but you can do it. You can start a magazine. You can start a newspaper. You can start a company. You can start an NGO. There's so many things you can do to recreate these intimate systems, and you're going to need them as you go forward.

As you circle the Earth,  you were buzzing around in your own head. And you had feelings and thoughts and desires and fears and worries and ids and superegos and egos. And as Nina described yesterday, you struggled with that newfound freedom. Am I doing enough? Should I have done more? But as Olivia described later, your brain was recording everything that was happening. And better than any AI that will ever be, your brain didn't have to be told what to do. You didn't have to force it, as you said. It does it on its own. And it connects the dots. It finds meaning in those related to you. And it creates artifacts that, when you need them in life, they are there for you to draw on.

But also, as Olivia said, experience is good. Reflection on it is great. And that's really something that I hope all of you do all along the way.

And you know what John Lennon said, life is what happens when you're planning something else. And something else happened in my Baret year. I began to imagine a future for Baret that was beyond anything I had originally thought.

And my hope is that in different ways, that same thing happens to each of you. You all came here for individual reasons. But you may well leave here with something much more, and that is a view of your life that you never previously imagined.

To all our Scholars: we know this journey is not over, that learning never stops, and that you will continue to grow for years to come. But we cannot wait to see what dreams and ideas are born of this year. You are already on your way to becoming poets, entrepreneurs, lawyers, filmmakers, and so much more. Your journey, from New York to Hong Kong, is just the beginning of a larger journey that will last a lifetime. And later in life, you will be able to look back on this year as a beginning of beginnings, a series of pivotal moments that shaped who you are and taught you how to value your agency, your freedom, and your friendships. As T.S. Eliot might put it, In their end is their beginning.

Congratulations to our Scholars on completing their best year yet!

If you want to watch a segment of Chris's speech, it can be found on our Instagram.

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