Background: Every year from 2003–2011, I contributed my “Words of Wisdom” to the “Staff Advice” portion of the Senior issue of the Stevenson Spotlight.
Then, like many newspapers, The Spotlight went on hiatus in 2012 (even if it had a resurgence in 2014–16), so I still needed to share my wisdom somewhere. I’ve gone longer form in recent years, and well, since the cost of digital ink is low, I’m OK with that.
But I still wished the Seniors who friended me on Facebook good luck. This year, I’m going a little bigger. So, here’s my Words of Wisdom for the Class of 2021.
My sincere congratulations and a fond farewell to the Class of 2021. My standard disclaimer to begin: Be careful. Be safe. Be smart. And remember, only you can prevent forest fires.
Usually, by late May, I have a solid sense of what form my remarks to the departing senior class will look and feel like. I’ve written a few of these, I’ve written on patience, on Abbey Road, the journey, learning experiences, fear, friendships, and knowledge, so perhaps some of the issues for me lies in that I’ve covered a lot of the ground that a commencement speaker, who might only have to do this once in their life if even that, and when I’m linking to my back catalog, it is in part to tell myself I can’t reheat some leftovers and call it a balanced meal. So I’m going to talk about myself for a minute, but I promise, I’m going somewhere with this because, as the sign in my room reminds me every day: “It’s not always about you, Mr. Barker.”
You will be graduating exactly two days before the 25th anniversary of my own graduation from Stevenson. In my mind, anyway, it is perhaps fateful that you will be the first Stevenson graduating class to have its commencement exercises on Anders Field in 15 years. You are literally where I was a quarter-century ago.
There are some details in this photo that you only notice if someone tells you to look for them.
1). Though 1996 me would not believe it, I actually had decent hair at that point in my life. I miss it sometimes.
2). I am wearing my Michigan tie because this was the symbolic crossing over between what had been and what would be.
I did not know it then, but I was entering what anthropologists call a period of liminality. To borrow straight from Wikipedia, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.”
One can argue that graduation serves as the rite of passage, the ending of one chapter, and the beginning of another. In the conventional wisdom, you’ve had Honors Night, prom, and now graduation, admittedly none of which look or feel like you had expected when you entered Stevenson in 2017. You might have a graduation party where your hard work is celebrated by family and friends, and perhaps a trip. In this summer of uncertainty, the disruption of the patterns of suburban American liminality has reared up and created challenges and discomfort. Many of you (or at least the ones who took the time to read this) are heading off to school in the fall and will be joined by a sophomore class that will be experiencing many of the firsts you’ll be experiencing right alongside you. It will be weird, but like everything of the past year and change, you’ll figure it out. But if you feel a little adrift right now, even in that vast ocean of hope, I understand.
The hardest part about liminality is the belief that possibilities are limitless—infinite promise stretching out before you if you’re just willing to work hard enough for it. I have come to believe that older generations tell this to recent graduates because it is projecting hope upon them, even if they know that the realities of the world are too complex and too challenging to offer a ceaseless number of paths truly. Even if in the broadest quantum sense this may exist, it is not reality. We can only control our controllables, and we come to learn fairly quickly in life that there are a vast number of things beyond our control. We can control how we react, how we respond, but even then, we’re human, and we make mistakes and have regrets about our reactions. But in the end, I loop back to Mary Schmich’s famous 1997 Chicago Tribune column about a theoretical graduation speech:
“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
Over the last four years, to varying degrees, I’ve got to watch you navigate a complex world to varying degrees of success. That isn’t a knock on any of you; that’s just the way the world is. But I guess I have spent all of the last few paragraphs trying to get to is simply this: I hope you can find a way to be happy. Happiness will change as you get older. What makes you happy today will not necessarily be the same thing in five years, in ten, in twenty-five. People will enter your life, and depart your life, sometimes on your timetable, sometimes without warning. Your priorities will change; at some point, likely, it won’t be about a you, but about an us, whatever that looks like.
Yet, as I say all of these things to you, I look at the photos of that day in June 1996, seeing the people I thought it was important to have photos with (or could find in the post-ceremony chaos), noting who is conspicuous by their absence. There is no way that the version of me standing on that field would have believed any of this. He believed in his ability to control things beyond his control far too much. He believed that he knew exactly the path his life was going to take. He would not have wanted to hear a teacher, no matter how well-intentioned, telling him that life is a complex series of changes. He couldn’t have believed it. But that’s OK. Because he’s a 17-year-old in a state of liminality. The rites of passage that still lay before him will change him, for the better in most ways, for the worse in superficial ways. But he eventually would have come around to the idea that the older guy was happy, and at some point, in that nascent twilight right before one truly falls asleep at night, he would have been comforted by it. I think. Well, really more, I hope it is true. I can’t know.
In the end, control the controllables, work to make yourself happy and hopefully others as well, and don’t worry if the path today as you stand at the threshold is not the path you end up following. You can’t possibly know.
Good luck to all of you!