It’s about Time in The Saddle
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself involved in a rather spunky conversation at a favorite local general store and dive called Tesuque Village Market. After the Syrah wore off (it took a good while, to be honest) the chat made me think a bit. Topic? The school I went to in Houston as a kid, which at various times can be quite accurately described as “insular,” “elitist,” “cloistered,” “rigorous,” and “cultish.” St. John’s in Houston was all of those things, and to this day remains so without apology, for better or worse.
Over time, St. John’s people tend to keep in touch and maintain extremely close personal friendships which, to a large extent, define their lives. “Same as everywhere,” a skeptic might say. But at St. John’s this is much more the case than with other institutions. I began to wonder why. In fact, I’ve thought about it a lot. It carries over into other relationships too. If you are a St. John’s person, you will think about it.
To many of us, St. John’s was an experience with traumatic elements: it was and remains hyper competitive, so challenging at times that it seemed like the objective really was to make hamburger out of us. It was relentless. It was monotonous and all-consuming, unpleasant, even. Why, then, did we not scatter to the winds after graduation and stay away from each other? Some do, but most don’t. What’s unusual about it, though, is that over time, we continue being close.
So I pondered.
Was it somehow a bonding experience to endure Mr. Stockman’s English class or to stare into the empty cubicles of Study Hall 40? Yes, those shared experiences are important, but that ain’t it.
An analogy helps: there’s an expression among cyclists about what matters in the sport if you’re to take it seriously and race: “time in the saddle.” It’s not so much how hard you train or how you ride or whose wheel you’re on, but how long you’re on the bike.
So I did some math.
“Lifers” at St. John’s make it from kindergarten through 12th grade. At roughly 190 days a year, we would have put in 2,483 days together by graduation. That’s 17,381 hours together. You tend to get to know one another with that much time.
So, you see where I’m going with this. It’s not the institution itself that influences how we “do” relationships, but the bare fact that we were together for so long. It’s time in the saddle. I was there 10 years, and those friends are still friends. I chat almost every week with my boss from my first advertising job in Houston (Hi Carol!) and to colleagues from a money markets trading job which followed a few years later. This carries into romantic relationships for at least two of us from the class of 1984. In Taos, NM, I married my kindergarten classmate, whom I’ve known since 1972. So much of life is about just being there versus not. We’re not all perfect, but if you stick together long enough, you do ok.
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