As my time at Boston College comes to an end, I have found myself thinking less about the big moments and more about the small ones. I came to Boston as a research scholar with a clear academic purpose. I wanted time to work on my PhD research into the flourishing of Catholic school principals, to read deeply, test ideas, write, present, teach and learn from people whose work I respected. I did all of that, and I am deeply grateful for those opportunities. Yet when I think about what I will remember most, it is not the number of pages written or the presentations delivered.
It is riding the T into the city and slowly learning the rhythm of a place that was once unfamiliar. It is standing on a platform with commuters heading in every direction, watching Boston pass by through the window and becoming, for a while, simply another person on the train. It is drinking coffee before work, after meetings, or with a book open in front of me. Often it was coffee shared with someone whose questions stayed with me long after the cup was empty.
And then there was the walking. I walked everywhere: across the Boston College campus, through neighbourhoods, and along streets lined with churches, cafés, old houses and university buildings. Sometimes I had somewhere to be; at other times I walked simply because I could. Walking became part of my thinking. Ideas that seemed complicated at a desk often felt different after several kilometres on foot. There was something about moving through the city that gave my thoughts room to move as well.
That became important because the question at the heart of my research is about flourishing: what enables people, particularly those carrying significant responsibility for others, to live and lead well? Boston gave me the rare gift of time to stay with that question. Some conversations affirmed the direction of my work; others unsettled it and made me rethink assumptions I had carried with me. I needed both. I arrived wanting to make progress on a PhD, but I leave with better questions. That may turn out to be the greater gift.
The journey was academic, but it was also physical and spiritual. Daily Mass became part of the rhythm of my time at Boston College. It offered a different pace from reading, writing and meetings and created space for gratitude. It reminded me that the value of a day could never be measured simply by how much I had produced.
Yet the spiritual journey was much bigger than Mass. Much of it happened through conversations. Some were with academics and colleagues; others happened over coffee, during a walk, around a meal or at the end of a long day. We talked about education and leadership, but we also talked about vocation, faith, purpose, family, hope and what it means to live a good life. Sometimes I was discussing my research. At other times, we found ourselves talking about the questions underneath the research.
Those conversations reminded me that spiritual life is not confined to a church or an explicitly religious moment. Sometimes it appears when another person asks the right question. Sometimes it is found in being listened to carefully. Sometimes it arrives through laughter, generosity, kindness, or a conversation that begins casually and somehow opens into something much deeper. Daily Mass mattered enormously, but so did the conversations before and after it, the people beside me, and the ordinary encounters that became moments of grace.
I think Boston helped me understand something about flourishing that I had known intellectually but perhaps had not fully lived. Flourishing cannot simply mean becoming more efficient at managing an already crowded life. It cannot become another technique for producing more or fitting another task into the day. It also requires attention: noticing the walk, the coffee, the train journey, the conversation, the person in front of us, and those moments when there is nowhere else we need to be.
Looking back, I realise that the small things were never really small. Riding the T, walking through Boston, drinking coffee, going to Mass, writing, thinking and talking with people became the texture of the experience. There were significant academic opportunities and achievements, and I will always be grateful for them, but they somehow sit within something larger.
Above all, it was the people I shared the experience with: a young theologian, a priest, an international athlete, a remarkable mum, a woman of action, and my roommate, an Italian musician with wisdom beyond his years. We came from different places, with different stories and different ways of seeing the world. We talked over coffee and meals, while walking, after Mass and at the end of long days. Some conversations were serious; others were filled with laughter. Many began with nothing particularly important and somehow became important.
Somewhere along the way, these people stopped being simply part of my Boston experience. They became the experience. That is perhaps what I will miss most: a face across a table, a shared joke, a question asked at just the right time, walking back after Mass, or someone simply saying, “Do you want to go food shopping?” These were ordinary moments, but gathered together they became something extraordinary, something I know I will carry with me long after I have left Boston.
I came to Boston expecting an academic journey. It was certainly that, but it became something much richer: a physical journey, a spiritual journey and, ultimately, a deeply human one. Perhaps that is why, as I prepare to leave, an old whakataukī from home feels more appropriate than anything else I could write: “He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.”
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.