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"Leadership Retreat: Traditions and Growth" By Jonathan Ooi

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It was my last Leadership Retreat. The start of every school year always has me rearing to go to the retreat. Now it’s all over. But I’m not sad at all.

This year was my fourth ever Leadership Retreat. I’ve been a member of PAL my whole time in high school, so these retreats were almost a routine (but one that I was absolutely optimistic about). I am always so excited to go for the retreat every year since it means spending time with some of my friends. 

“The Leadership Retreat is one of those school trips that only a few can participate in, which makes it more special because our hard work for elections provided us with this opportunity to bond with our fellow leaders,” says Ee Rynn Ong (12). We got a lot of free time and many of us went to the pool or simply lounged around as we soaked in the fact that there was a whole year ahead of us.

Because I’ve been to so many Leadership Retreats, I have a few traditions that have lasted since my freshman year. Every year, I would wake up at 4-5 in the morning and just go outside to sit and talk with friends, waiting for the sunrise. I did it because the curfew was at 10:30 PM, which meant that we only got 2 hours of free time to talk, but I discovered that there wasn’t anything preventing me from waking up extremely early to go hang out with friends. The next year, we bought some of those 2X Spicy Buldak noodles (the WORST noodles to eat as your first meal, I don’t recommend it at all), and the tradition just carried on from there. Although I was planning on continuing this tradition into this year, a huge thunderstorm rolled over; there was no way I would go out that early just to suffer the wrath of those noodles without a sunrise to numb the pain.

The thing was, I wasn’t even sad that I couldn’t go. In fact, most of us felt completely numb. We all came to the point where we realized that some things just don’t last forever. While everybody else who planned to go just went back to sleep, I couldn’t. I couldn’t help but feel conflicted over my reaction to this sudden break of tradition. Why was I so okay with just leaving it behind? 

That’s when I came to an epiphany. We are all just constantly changing and growing. Part of that growth is learning to leave behind some things. I don’t ever regret waking up that early to go out. I don’t regret going on these retreats. I needed to learn to let go. They wouldn’t last forever and I knew that. We all knew that. 4 years of high school means 4 years of growth. You can change a lot in 4 years. 


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