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Your accomplishments, your hard work, and the growth from the challenges you’ve overcome, have brought you to this one moment as you sit amongst your family and peers to accept the reward of your efforts. And it’s not your diploma.
Diplomas are pieces of paper that testify your advancement, but it is not the most important gift you have been given today. The large graduation ceremony is an occasion to celebrate your success, but even that is not significant enough to be the gift you truly deserve. The presents, the cards, the party, and the money, are still not as important. It’s really very simple, and often so brief that many miss the opportunity to receive it.
Years of achievement rest easily behind you and the unlimited possibilities of the future wait ahead, and in this moment you are free. This is the deep breath before the plunge. You stand suspended between two worlds and in this stillness you are given the chance to reflect. It may seem like an anticlimactic gift, but this is an opportunity for the observer to become the observed, giving you a moment liberated from responsibility and action and allowing you to just be.
Acknowledge this moment. Honor yourself.
Life gets busy, and not many moments are perfectly reserved for self-inquiry. Always remember this inward place, because knowing you can always return to it is one of the most precious gifts you receive today.
Congratulations Class of 2014, and welcome, Class of 2015! I’ll leave you with the poignent poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Go forth and be the captains of your soul!