Tomorrow night our seniors graduate and enter the next phase of their lives. Yesterday I chaperoned our senior brunch, and the sight of those young people reveling in their freedom coupled with the excitement/anxiety over my own high school reunion on Saturday triggered an unexpected wave of nostalgia.
As they all gathered on the dance floor to perform the "Cotton-Eye Joe" line dance (a favorite middle-school gym teacher taught them this dance and they went crazy when the DJ played that song), I was struck at how that one thing, that one common experience, pulled them together. The AP kids and the vocational school students, the preppy suburbanites and the farm boys, the popular and the socially challenged, all came together and in that one moment had a common bond. That's the thing with high school, isn't it? It's probably the last time in our lives we're in a truly heterogeneous group; from there on out, we work and play with people much like ourselves, people with common interests and goals.
I've thought a lot since yesterday about the person I was in high school and how I've changed. On my own graduation day 15 years ago, I thought the world was my oyster. I hadn't yet learned that not every oyster has a pearl.
Our class was special. We had been told so by teachers from middle-school through high-school and believed we could do anything and be anything we wanted. And I am glad we had teachers who believed in us and made us believe in ourselves. So many of us were the first of our families to go to college. Some were even the first to get high-school diplomas. Starting with our wonderful 7th-grade English teacher, we had teachers who expected nothing less than higher education for us. They prepared us, they pushed us, they built us up. They took a bunch of kids who in another school might have been labelled "at risk" due to their socioeconomic backgrounds and made scholars out of them. I left my high school knowing that I was bright and capable and among the best of the best. Then came my first year of college, and I saw pretty quickly that I still had so much to learn.
The sad truth of life, and something you'll never hear in a graduation speech, is that not every person can be whatever he or she chooses to be. A tone-deaf person will never be a Grammy-winning recording artist (though American Idol would be a lot less fun if people were this honest with themselves.) A kid that only grows to 5-feet tall and trips over his own feet will never play for the NBA. That's not to say that hard work and determination mean nothing. But first, you must figure out what your strengths are. What are the talents you have been given? Hard work means little if you're working on the wrong path; I could devote every waking moment for the rest of my life to studying art and taking courses and paint canvas after canvas, but I would never be an artist. I doubt I could ever produce anything more complex than a stick figure. That's not how my brain works, and no training in the world can make me see the world the way a true artist does. When hard work and God-given talent combine--now that's when dreams come true.
15 years ago I still had that optimism, that hope, that I saw in many of our graduates yesterday. It's a hope that's not bound by the limits of talent or chance. It's a hope only the young can have. When I graduated, here's where I told people I wanted to be in 10 years: I said I wanted to be right there at my old high school, teaching AP English and directing school plays, married to Jason, with 2 kids (a boy and a girl, of course), a cat, and a nice house with a white picket fence. This was very realistic, and I've managed to fashion a life pretty darn close to that. But deep down, I thought I would be "more" than that. I thought I would take Centre College by storm, singing in the select singing group, getting the lead roles in the plays, and acing any class that required writing. I thought I would maybe get "discovered" as an actress while in college and go to New York and become a leading lady in a soap opera. Or, if that fell through, maybe I would write a bestselling novel in my first couple of summers off from teaching. Oh, I didn't plan on these things happening. But since I had always been built up to be so smart, and since I was voted "Most Talented", I thought there was a chance all these magnificent things could actually happen to me (with minimal work on my part.)
My first year of college put a pin in the balloon of my lofty dreams. I tried out for the select singing group and didn't make it; I auditioned for a play and got a call back for the lead but in the end didn't even get a non-speaking role; I submitted articles to the college paper that got published but only after being edited to the point of not being my work anymore; I worked harder than I had ever worked on academic writing but got B's on every single paper I turned in in every class (until the very last paper I wrote in spring term's humanities class, when I got an A- and thought I would cry with relief.) Everywhere I looked I saw people smarter than me, more talented than me, and certainly more driven than me. I wasn't used to this. I wasn't used to working hard. I wasn't used to not succeeding. I almost gave up.
Things eventually started to click and I found my place. But I only found my place after sitting down and taking a hard, critical look at myself. I had to be honest about my talents. I discovered some things I was good at doing that I hadn't explored before, and admitted that some of the things I enjoyed, and thought I did well, were only mediocre gifts. Sadly, some of these things weren't learned until pretty late in the game (a great regret of my life is that I focused so much on music in college and didn't take a creative writing course until the winter of my senior year.)
Seeing our graduates, and thinking about the young girl I was 15 years ago, I almost wish I could go back in time and talk to her. But I don't know if she would listen; youth is stubborn and head-strong. More than likely, the 18-year-old and ready-to-graduate Cranky (who wasn't yet cranky, by the way) would have smiled her biggest smile, thanked me politely for my concern, and gone off to daydream about a life of unrealistic possibilities.
I guess that's the real magic of graduation, then. The open door; the wide world and all its possibilities; the freedom to choose your own ending. There will be some whose lives will exceed even their own expectations. It's all about hope, I suppose.
Hope, and a final line dance to "Cotton-Eye Joe."
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