Graduation 2015

Ah, graduation: the culmination of years of work, learning, and personal growth all wrapped up in a funny hat with a tassel. Oh, to be young again.

When I graduated from high school in the summer of 2000, I had high hopes and great plans. I was about to leave town for a three week road-trip along the Pacific Coast, and upon my return I was going to UCLA as a member of the university's honor's program. I was the cream of the cream. I was the top of the top.

But what is down on paper and what is locked in one's heart seldom match, and I was as (or possibly more) anxious, scared, and unprepared as the rest when I walked down that long aisle made of eight hundred white folding chairs on the football field.

As I watched my peers pass by, I dreamed dreams for them: doctor, lawyer, musician, architect. Some of these dreams came true, some did not. But they were my dreams, so they didn’t matter. The test that counts is if people dream their own dreams and make those dreams come true. A dream dreamed for another is like a breeze of warm air: beautiful, perhaps, but destined to blow away.

And what did I dream for myself? I dreamed for a chance to find myself in myself: to be, and to be happy with being. To be happy being me.

It has been a long journey.

For all the graduates of 2015, I wish and hope that you have as much success with your own dream as I have had in mine, but I desperately hope you don't have to wait 15 years to get there. But if you do, you will be in good company, for along the way, I have realized that I can be quite a humorous companion.

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