High school graduations, by their very nature, are bittersweet affairs. For the graduates it is a celebration of their life’s work to date; the formal demarcation between childhood and their launch into the great wide world.
For the parents it is also the celebration of a conclusion; the culmination of a labor of love, 17, 18 years in the making, usually. For both parties, it is an end to one of life’s major chapters.
Although each year, each class, each individual is different, the essential experience is not. Year in and year out, commencement exercises and speakers revisit, rehash, and recast the same themes.
This is your/our time, graduating class, the valedictorians, salutatorians, and various guest speakers say. You/we enter the world as young adults with a limitless future ahead of you/us. We/you can change the world. Rise to your/our potential. Work hard, play hard, laugh a lot, find time for love, and life will be glorious: so forth and so on.
Any parent with a graduate in the family has heard the spiel which likely echoes the same spiel they heard when they themselves were wearing mortarboard hats.
The reason the message does not change year to year is because that is the message. Aiming high, believing in yourself, working hard, playing hard, remembering to love and laugh, and family, is the recipe for a good life.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but applying some combination of hard work, talent, skill, and determination is usually enough to bring rewards.
Every student graduating this year moves into the world with a blank canvas before them. For them the sky literally is the limit. Their future is nothing but potential.
Twenty or 30 or so odd years into the future, most of this year’s graduates will attend another high school graduation, watching their own child go through the process. They will hear new versions of the same speeches they heard this year.
If they stop to wonder why that is, it is because those things will still be true.
Good luck to the graduates of 2015. The world is your oyster. There are pearls to be made.
