A Farewell to My Seniors

It has been years since I first assigned commencement speeches to my seniors to end their high school experience. The stories they have told year after year always reaffirm why I keep doing this job. It has become a tradition for me to deliver a speech of my own to end the year. Here is this year's edition.

In his book Fablehaven Brandon Mull writes, “Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”

That’s one thing I hoped to accomplish with these speeches to conclude the year. I hope Maddi’s statement that being cat-called makes women feel unsafe prevents all the young men sitting here from making that mistake. I hope Ryan’s mistake of not getting involved right away in high school inspires you to jump right into things in college. I hope the cautionary tales people have shared about addictions and eating disorders prevent you all from making the mistake of ignoring warning signs and encourage you to ask for help when you need it. 

Listening to stories and trying to learn from them is what made me become an English teacher. Reading books is one of my favorite pastimes and sharing those books with others is one of my greatest joys. That joy was present every time one of you expressed outrage at Leonie’s behavior, or fought back tears on behalf of Jojo, or shook your head at Hamlet’s hesitation. The best days were the ones when you put your books back in your bags as the bell rang and continued the conversation into the hall. The very best days were those when you turned that conversation inward and used our discussions to examine your own lives. 

So today I want to share with you a few passages from some of my favorite books of all time, words of strangers that guide me each day. 

My first quote comes from a play I studied in college all those years ago called Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”

As a tap-dancing theater kid in the late 80s I knew that the performing was a mighty purpose. I was going to tapdance my way into the hearts of all America and make this world a better place through song. But not everyone spoke kindly of a boy who loved singing, dancing, and monologues, and without even realizing it I grew to hate a part of myself I had onced loved. As I grew up I tried to match the masculine norms society showed me. By my early twenties I was a combative, chain-smoking jerk who drank too much and pushed people away. I believed that made me more of a man than being kind and creative. 

I am 47 now. I’ve been to therapy. I have learned to look back on my tap-dancing self with admiration and love. It took a courageous little dude to keep practicing triple time steps and chromatic scales. His purpose was a mighty one. He just didn’t realize his opinion was the only one that mattered. I hope you do. 

That same quote goes on to say,”I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can.” This is one of my core beliefs: life is given meaning through serving others. Coaching my sons’ flag football teams, caring for my aging parents, teaching. The best moments of my life are when my efforts benefit not myself, but someone else. Those are the moments I feel like it matters. 

To serve others one must see them first and that requires looking out at the world rather than down at a phone. In his book Anxious People Frederick Backman writes, “If people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves”

Remember those images are highlight reels at best, and complete photoshopped falsehoods at worst. Measure yourself against those carefully curated images and life is doomed to not measure up. Real life is messy sometimes. 

When those difficult times have come for me, I have found solace in nature. In his book Cloud Cuckoo Land Anthony Doerr creates a character who also finds sanctuary out in the woods. “There is magic in this place” he writes the first time he wanders out into the trees. “You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.” 

We are animals. We were not meant to move from one temperature controlled and artificially lit environment to another. We are meant to experience the silence of the empty woods, the haunting call of an owl in the distance. We were meant to run. We were meant to explore. We were meant to feel our legs burning and our lungs bursting while in pursuit of something. We were meant to stare up at the stars in wonder, and contemplate just how small our problems really are. It is all about perspective. Phones and social media often magnify our problems. Nature makes them shrink.

When you do get out there, pay attention to the sunrises and sunsets. John Green (read all his books) once wrote “A sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.”

When the circumstances of your life knock you sideways wake up early and go watch the sun come up. It is nearly impossible to watch the world turn from darkness to light and not feel at least a glimmer of hope. 

But, remember that not everyone in life has the good fortune to relax in nature. Everyday you will interact with people struggling to get by, people working multiple minimum wage jobs just to put food on their table and keep the lights on. Sometimes those people will mess up your order, or be unable to fix the mistake in your cellphone bill. When that happens remember what Sirius Black taught us in Harry Potter: "If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals" I don’t like the idea of labeling people as “inferior” but you get the point. Everybody is polite when they are trying to impress someone in power. What matters is how you behave when interacting with everyone else. 

Whenever possible, show people love. “And what is love, in the end?” asks Gabrielle Zevin in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?” That’s what Mary Jane did. She simply wanted to ease others’ journeys through life and that is what she did for countless students, countless staff members, and me. She always listened when people spoke. She always ended conversations with a kiss and a hug. She always told everyone she loved them. We should all aspire to that. 

If your interactions do go sideways, as they sometimes will, remember what Nathan Hill writes in his book The Nix: “Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard…the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it.” I used to be angry a lot. Trust me when I tell you it is better to be understanding and forgiving. 

“To like something is to insult it,” Matt Haig writes in The Humans. “Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.” He is right. 

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks,” Scout tells her brother in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. She is also right. 

In This Is How it Always Is Laurie Frankel says, “Not much of what I value in our lives is easy.” Hard work, challenging yourself, testing your limits are all integral parts of a meaningful life. Life isn’t designed to be easy. As soon as it is, all the meaningful parts start to atrophy. Don’t sit silently because you are nervous; speak up. Don’t buy an e-bike; pedal harder. Don’t use AI to form your thoughts; think. 

Using Death as his narrator, Markus Zusak offers us an important reminder in The Book Thief: “HERE IS A SMALL FACT: You are going to die.” That is why I have the 31,412 tattoo: my life expectancy in days. On average a human life is around 30,000 days. Check the math, then make sure you are using each and every one of them for something meaningful. 

“We are all fixing what is broken,” Abraham Verghese writes in Cutting for Stone

“It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.” Do the work anyway.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is another of my recent favorites. “Whenever you feel afraid, just remember,” she writes. “Courage is the root of change - and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others' opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, [people]. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.”

There are just a handful of half days separating you from graduation and the next exciting chapter of your lives. I hope you feel more confident as readers. I hope you feel more confident expressing yourself in writing. I hope above all you feel more confident in your ability to decode the stories around us and take from them the valuable lessons they offer. Books, movies, television shows, tales told around campfires, and anecdotes shared with strangers while waiting for a pizza because you decided not to pull out your phone. I also hope you want as much as I do for those stories to come from people and our shared experience rather than from chatbots or whatever more advanced form of AI comes next. 

I look forward to hearing where your stories go from here. I wish you all confidence and adventure. Congratulations.