It’s Graduation weekend 2010…the 48 hour notice to sink or swim; show up, show off and showcase the chapters of a nameless book handed to you at birth then filled with twelve painstaking years of stealing the art from teachers and community leaders who’ve dedicated their paths to creating a difference on the horizons you’re guaranteed to chase.
The front door of your tiny fuzzy cocoon is standing wide open and your Dad isn’t going to shout from the back room, “What? Do you think we live in a barn?” Just like your first step taken 14 to 15 years earlier, the parental figures sit opposite your dreams with warm invitations to climb out, dry off those damp wings and catch a passing breeze.
Like the itty bitty teeny weenie spiders creatively designed at the end of Charlotte’s Web, you’re now part of a million reasons why this weekend sail across the unpredictable seas of everyday life should inspire everyone including couples or singles that have or won’t have children one day taking the same steps.
One of you will continue to develop inner peace and solitude for patients diagnosed with breast cancer. Another will be given the clearance to give Mr. and Mrs. Johnson a home loan helping to lift the economy with better sales numbers. Expeditions will include multitudes of career opportunities and choices from restaurant managers to car dealers who don’t have to scream in their radio commercials.
We look forward to meeting the people, place or thing who’ll be handed the rights to paste together the next best music, television or computer format. More low priced electric cars will appear on roads that don’t require foreign fuels to keep smooth. Public school systems will close creating paths for major businesses to develop a system that sends their employees out into the world by way of becoming private teachers who’ll make home visits like doctors once did.
I invite you not to be afraid of the future.
Everything the world has today was industrialized to make lives easier and better. If a fear of failure had taken a swim with Bill Gates, Apple wouldn’t have been challenged to make Mac’s more approachable for all people. I can’t imagine going about life without the service of ATM cards, online banking and pay at the pump gas stations.
Television newscasts, gloss covered magazine articles and well educated business owners have spent the past six months tearing your new found place in history apart. There aren’t summer jobs, there won’t be numbers waiting for you after college, eating fast food then washing it down with a triple sized power drink will continue give twenty year olds premature heart attacks and cancer.
Believe in your tomorrow by participating in your today.
Physically taking care of the moment to which you currently hold is a single brick on a foundation that has the full blessing to stand in the days after all that is natural is taken away. Your legacy is meant to inspire, influence and bring light to the generations that’ll be invited to the game after the coach has hung your jersey above the highest nose bleed seats.
What you do today is the one time yellow yolk waiting to send its baby soft beak through a granite wall. Once cracked, the evidence of there being a tomorrow shoots your roots into the tiny hole and out into a universe that’s waited extremely patiently for you to get here.
Sometime in the next 48 hours and every day thereafter stand in front of the image in the mirror and congratulate him or her for enduring the very struggles you have. You’ve received gifts, pats on the back, words of encouragement and a chunk of paper that says you’ve kept true to the rules and graduated… Sadly, the image you see even when you don’t want to recognize them gets nothing. It doesn’t require materialistic value to be what it truly is…your best friend.
I am a firm believer that nothing is brought into this world without someone first walking into a bedroom or bathroom and calmly asking, the mirrored image “So what do you think?”
That person will never tell you to bring damage to your dreams. The image may cry with you but in the end it stands up the very second you do and that should be inspiration enough to look over its shoulder and catch a glimpse of the horizon you can touch if given a second or third chance.
It will age with you because it doesn’t want you to feel alone when your hair begins to change and you can’t figure out how to slow down the hands of time. Assumption makes you feel like the image argues with you…each time you stop believing, it’s actually saying, “But I believe in you.”
And when you locate that day when you shamefully can’t stand the way the image looks, smells and feels…spend a few more moments within the unprotected eyes of the image inside…those curves, colors and lines once belonged to your mother, father, grand parents and those before them—reach out to touch it knowing without them none of us would be gifted with the presence of your everyday.
Be you by liking and loving you first. I thank you in advance for all the great things you’re about to create. Don’t blink too quickly…it’ll suddenly be your 30 year class reunion with nothing to wear.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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