Graduation Takes A Lifetime

It’s graduation and you’re sitting in the back while the high school sweethearts slow dance wondering what your life has in store for you.

You’re surrounded by aviators and brain surgeons, veterinarians and electricians and your chest is tightening because you just don’t see it, you can’t see you, ten years from now, with a career and a house and a car and kids and you don’t understand how anyone here could be so sure of themselves or where they’re headed.

Where’s the map, you wonder, where’s the rulebook on waking up tomorrow because all of a sudden they say you’re supposed to be an adult and it’s all going much too fast. You wish time would slow down.

You want tonight, for all its white balloons and ballroom gowns and non alcoholic wine and over enthusiastic DJs and teary eyed teachers and proud parents and all of the people you’ve grown up with the last 6 most significant years of your life, to last forever. You don’t want to forget anyone’s names. You don’t want to leave any of this behind. But you must. And it’s okay to be afraid.

Tomorrow the sun will come up, just as it always has, and always will and you will be given two choices, each day, again and again, over and over for the rest of your life: do or don’t. And my god I hope you do. I hope you seize every moment. I hope you live fiercely and laugh deeply and love wildly because the truth of the matter is whatever comes next, whether its an eternity of nothing or a kingdom up in the sky, graduation is not the few short hours we’re given to celebrate our arrival into adulthood. Graduation takes a lifetime. And what you make of it is entirely and always up to you.