05/26/2026
Humans of Wesleyan 🎬3️⃣2️⃣
"A couple weeks ago, my friend told me this story.
It was his last day in French class, and the professor was conjugating the final tense on the board.
“There,” he said. “That’s it. You’ve done it all. You’ve learned French.”
I love that conclusion. That you can finish an unfinishable task. That at some point, in some classroom, on some stage, someone shakes your hand and says, “Good work here. You’ve done all you could do—go home now.”
Decades ago, when I was a freshman, I imagined that culmination. I was looking for someone to just tell me the answer—to say, “Kid, this is it!” But instead of any single discovery, I hung around here for years and read lots of books, threw parties, fell in love with my friends, and stayed up late, woke up early. I got many answers—long and slow.
We all did. Editing The Argus taught me how to work with sentences and their people. Discrete math taught me how to prove something. Jazz workshops taught me to arrive prepared and to be surprising. Friendships taught me to linger in conversations, to dance wildly, to hug. We got answers at dinner parties and dance parties and kitchens and theaters and classrooms and libraries. We became aware of these answers, really, when we stopped consuming ourselves with the questioning.
Because you never really finish, I don’t think. Yes, at some point you finish a book. A major. You graduate. Yes, at some point, this point, on some stage, this one, someone shakes your hand and says, “Go home now.”
And then you wake up the next morning, and you take down your posters and put them into boxes, and all of your plates, and all of your bowls—and you leave this place. But still. Four years from now, a Wesleyan-away, how we’ve chosen to live will continue to shape us. We can keep playing in bands. We can keep learning French.
This summer, I’m driving west to work as a raft guide on Idaho’s Salmon River. From there, I plan to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I worked as a local reporter last summer. I’m leaving Middletown, but I will continue to seek community, truth, joy, and September employment."
- Thomas Lyons '26, Commencement Student Speaker
