Graduation Address

When I was in pre-K, I was thrilled about the part I received in our play: Lion. But when the show came around, I was too shy to go on stage. Instead, I sat in my mom’s lap, costume and all, and closed my eyes. As a kid, I was so shy I never looked people I talked to in the eyes, and speaking in front of an audience, was tantamount to skipping snack time. But my mom, never shy of pushing me into the limelight, walked me on stage and I stood looking away from the audience so I, too, could be in the production. It’s a testament to Pembroke’s strength that my mom is crying in the audience today instead of holding my hand, crying on stage with me.

I thought for a long time about important life lessons that I could impart to everyone in the ridiculously minute time allotted for this speech. My time is probably already up, but since this is my last shot at really getting bang for my tuition money’s buck, I plan on going a little over.

One of my classmates asked me earlier in the year: “Why don’t you do more Pembroke stuff?” […] When I think about it, I don’t always consider what an incredibly eclectic group of people are around me, I think about me. Because life is a myriad of little experiences, all about me. And in my own little microcosm, I have the freedom to be incredibly self-involved. Here’s an example: I love spaghetti day. And when I go to lunch, it’s easy to shout “Oh hey Andy, I have a question for you” and cut the entire line. Or, I can think about the quiet girl in front, who might even be hungrier than I am because she skipped breakfast this morning to help her sick little brother. A lot of the freedom people think about when they think of senior year is the freedom to party, to choose a college, to spend more time helping the community, and the freedom to skip classes and homework. And I have done all of those things, much too liberally to admit in front of so many people who hold the power to “ground me for the weekend.” But as David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, … and discipline, … and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in [a] myriad [of] … little[,] unsexy ways, every day.”

See, for the longest time, Pembroke identities have been figured out in my head and in everyone else’s: Andy has been the leader; Tiffani, the star athlete; Isaac, the one guy who knows how to knit; Kate, the fashion designer; and I’ve been the “semi-funny, partially enigmatic writer guy,” which presumably explains why I’m in front of everyone today. We have all had the freedom to accept the easiest answers about our identities.

But this year, I started to look around my class. There wasn’t some instantaneous revelation — it took me a while to understand what I was noticing. It was when, after a long night of festivities, I looked up into the deep purple sky above the Stuckmeyer ranch, that I realized that all those stereotypes don’t mean much of anything. Carlton may not win as many Grammys as his beloved Alicia Keys, but he might end up a music teacher in a small, suburban high school, cursing the loud kids who come late to his class holding cookies (Am I right, Mr. Burke?).

Stereotypes are nothing but habit. Walter Pater said that, “It might even be … that our failure is to form habits: for… habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and … it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.” I failed, because I relied for far too long on the easy stereotypes at the risk of getting to know the people I’ve been sitting next to in math class for all of my life. And I think other people have too. When my inquisitive classmate asked why I didn’t do more Pembroke stuff, I wasn’t really “too cool” for it, I was just too scared to look past surface appearances and seek out those beautiful hopes and dreams we all keep locked up inside like a child’s diary. It’s natural to assume that your own problems are singular. But the truth is that everyone is sad about leaving their friends, their families, and their homes behind, and anxious about nearly every aspect of the future.

I wanted to try something really quickly with everyone, please stay standing. Stand up if you are a student athlete. Stand up if you skipped every Pembroke dance you could. Stand up if you were a member of student government. Stand up if you are the first person in your immediate family to attend college. Stand up if you’re a visual artist. Stand up if you are a musician, a singer, or a Thespian. Stand up if you volunteered in your community outside the required events. Finally, stand up if you are terrified of college. For all the stereotypes at the end of the day, we have a tremendous amount in common. We all came to Pembroke for an enriching education in a cozy classroom setting, a diverse and challenging student body, and incredible campus, faculty, and staff… and now, here we are, we made it, and we’re all immeasurably better for it.

And the talent we all have won’t be changed all that significantly by where we go to school. Some of us got into all the colleges we applied to; some of us got into almost none of them. But every college that graduates a Pembroke Hill student will be a fortunate place, and each of us will reminisce that it was the best place in the world. Because it will be. College will help us dive into subjects we’re really passionate about. Someone might even make the same mistake Mr. Griffiths did, and become a math teacher. But reading Cornell West taught me an important lesson: life doesn’t just start with learning that ends after college or graduate school. Life IS learning. And just like Plato said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Quoting a frequently cited ancient philosopher isn’t the end of my speech, I promise. What Plato didn’t clearly explicate, but my much wiser classmates inadvertently did, is that purely conquering knowledge is only one of the ways of examining life. Racing for money will only leave us lonely and over-consumed. Racing for knowledge alone will only remind us how dumb we really are. Perfect grades are invaluable in life, but so are perfect friendships, relationships, camp-outs, pranks, Saturday Hi-Hat gatherings, art shows, and more.

For way too long, I focused on the pure learning one at the expense of relationships, and I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I won’t remember the “F” I got on a math test freshman year, even if my mom will. I will, however, remember Dr. Graves constantly blaming Neal for the spelling errors on his TRTs, [accent] Mr. Beeler’s relaxation techniques, and Ms. Jones threatening to break my neck if I dared pretend I was Olympic curling her to assembly. It’s the memories we have and everyone that we go out of our way to help in big or small ways that will make all the difference, the moments when the person across from us acknowledges what we just did for them. When Pedro, at Gordon Parks, told Lewis and me that debate class on Tuesdays was the single event of the whole week that he looked forward to most. Those moments truly give life meaning.

What this year has really been about is cementing those relationships. It won’t work perfectly, because we each also have the freedom to never see this class again. But I figured out that throwing away so much work is the most foolish thing you could ever do. First, because I’m bad at making friends. Second, because it will be hard to ever make better ones. Watching everyone around me change since I arrived in Kindergarden has been incredible. When I first met Adam Mendehlson, he loved NASCAR more than Jimmy Stewart. If you don’t get that joke, it’s because Jimmy Stewart is a famous NASCAR driver and I still can’t figure out who watches NASCAR. Now, he’s an engineering genius and he’s moved on to bigger (and faster) things: jet planes. When I first met Erica, she was a middle school sports phenom. Now she’s a rising photographer in the art world. When I first met Cole, he had shoulder-length hair, pretended he was a skateboarder, and gave Mr. Dekker’s patience a run for its money, every day. Now, he’s certainly slightly better groomed and wants to major in physics. When I first met Elizabeth, she had baked over 100 cupcakes for the class for her presidential campaign. Since then, she has traveled the United States, the world, and has made the bandana into a fashion icon. She has been the glue that holds this class together: not just with her delicious baked goods, but her limitless spirit. These are friends it will be impossible to top, and I expect every one of us to stay in touch. Why? Because we can, and we should.

Sometimes I lie awake at night atop my comfortable, green plaid flannel sheets and I wish that I could stop the relentless forward movement of time. Everyone has those moments: regrets about tests not studied for, girls not asked to a dance, boys not invited to a party, games of frisbee skipped, books not read, movies not seen, steps not taken. But no matter how many times I’ve sat there, I haven’t been able to stop the second hand from lapping back to 12. Regrets don’t just disappear either. Our true freedom comes when we stop regretting and start acting; when we quit drawing artificial differentiations between each other and remember the time we slept inside the school and held hands under sleeping bags. Just because we could.

Here are two unrelated facts: When Raphael was 18, he painted the Baronci altarpiece; when Alexander the Great was 16, he fought back the Maedi resistance. Those are depressing statistics for someone who had trouble forcing himself to memorize 75 words for one of Ms. Lacy’s vocab quizzes. I’ve been chasing those kind of accomplishments like mad for all four years of high school, and I haven’t gotten close. But I also don’t have to, yet.
You get to these landmark times in your life, like high school graduation or college graduation, or your first real job that make you stop thinking purely about what your plans are for tomorrow, and start planning for all the tomorrows that will follow. It’s these moments that make you stop texting your friends for just a few seconds, put down your phone, and think. Every single one of us is at one of these landmark moments. In the Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano wrote that “[we] walked backward . . . gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.” That’s what we’re all doing: we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re absolutely thrilled about it. Some people have it all planned out: attend a top-notch college, get a perfect score on the MCAT, rock their residency and start doctoring. Now, partly because jobs like Alexander the Great’s don’t quite exist anymore, some people, like me, don’t have the slightest clue. Even the future doctors can’t quite anticipate that required studio art course that will thrust them in a completely new and thrilling direction. Even as we take yet another step into the unknown, one response we can all throw out is that, whatever we do, we expect to do it with some of our oldest and best friends. Life is beautiful and fragile. While it lasts, the single most important thing is to enjoy every second of the journey itself.

Success is one of the most subjective words ever. With that in mind, I wish the class of 2010 the greatest success in the world. More importantly, I wish us all success in carrying out a little of what I talked about here at the party closest to the end of this ceremony. And, regardless of whether a student at Pembroke paints the next Baronci altarpiece, I wish everyone happiness. And no matter how steep things get, we will all have the freedom to keep sacrificing for, and reaching out to, one another, and I expect everyone to do just that.