Graduating Into Your Own Life

I grew up in northern Ontario, about three hundred miles north of Toronto, in a town with a population of five thousand, one traffic light, two bars, and ten churches. A few years ago, I received an email telling me I was being awarded a place in the local high school’s Hall of Fame- something I didn’t even know existed. Accepting the award involved speaking to the graduating class at spring convocation. I’d only been back to the town once in the last thirty years, and it had not gone well. Travelling through the area, I’d stopped at a restaurant parking lot on the edge of town, suddenly feeling nauseous. Getting out of the car and bending over to hold my heaving stomach, I suddenly realized how painfully out of place I’d always felt in this small conservative town. It was a bit of a shock really- but the body does not lie, and mine was protesting so loudly I got in back in my car and drove on.

Despite this, I accepted the award and headed north. The organizers wanted a short address- a recitation of the poem “The Invitation,” and a three to five minute inspirational talk for the graduates. I was guessing that, “Congratulations, I got out of this town- now you can too!” wasn’t what they had in mind. I pondered what might have been helpful for me to hear when I was seventeen. I mulled, I wrote, I meditated, I prayed.

Before I left, my oldest son Brendan offered some advice. “You know, you don’t need to worry so much about this. It doesn’t really matter what you say. They aren’t really going to listen anyway. You’re too old.”

He was right of course, but I knew my inner seventeen year old would be listening.

The graduation ceremony was in the town’s arena. Teachers and administrators got up and gave the live-your-best-life cheerleading speeches. Graduates received diplomas while someone at the mic told us their future plans. Many were going “directly into the work force” at low paying jobs in the area. One young woman had sung an absolutely breath-taking acappella song at the start of the evening. As she accepted her diploma it was announced that she was going to be trained as a beautician. Now cutting hair and doing nails is a perfectly fine way to make a living, but this girl could really sing. When I quietly asked the teacher next to me why she wasn’t going to Julliard (she was that good) I was told her parents wanted her to get a skill that would ensure employment.

I was sitting on stage, facing the graduates who were in the first few rows of the audience. Although they were sitting in alphabetical order, it just happened that the front row held a collection of beautiful, well-dressed, clear-skinned young women and cocky, athletic looking young men who were whispering and flirting, clearly impatient to get on with the real event of the evening- the party afterwards. Then I noticed several graduates in the second row watching those in front of them with avid interest and naked envy. A few were overweight and had skin ravaged by the hormones of adolescence. One had thick glasses with dark frames held together on one side with masking tape. One young woman looked truly miserable as she watched the social interaction between those directly in front of her. If there was an A-list party, those in the second row had not been invited.

When the time came I walked up to the podium and surveyed the crowd. The arena was hot, humid and packed to capacity. Everyone in town seemed to be there. I recited “The Invitation,” looked at those in the second row, and spoke.

“If you have not felt like you fit in at high school, if- because of who you are, or how you look, or who you love, or what interests you- you have felt alone or isolated, congratulations! You just made it through the worse four years of your life. You will never again have so little power to decide where you are or what you do. Your parents and teachers and others who care about you, in an effort to prepare you for life, have told you a story about who you are and what you can and should do. Now, it’s your job to sift through all of what you have been given and decide what is useful to you and what is not. Because. . . .” and here I made myself slow down, “. . . . a lot of what you have been taught has nothing to do with you. If it is not useful to you, if it does not help you create the life you want and need to flourish- throw it out! From now on, you must decide and discover who you are and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. Decide for yourself. Find out who you really are. It’s your life. Live it.”

There was a short stunned silence followed by a smattering of polite applause.

The next day, driving south, I felt as if some kind of weight had been lifted from me. Alone in the car, I spoke aloud. “So that’s it? Stop worrying about what others think of you? Stop listening to someone else’s story about who you are or what you can do? Did I get it?” And then, I did something I rarely do- I asked the universe for a sign, something immediate and dramatic to confirm that I had offered my inner seventeen year old (and maybe even some of the graduates) something useful. And less than three seconds later, as I rounded a bend in the highway, a large black bear (my birth totem) reared up at the side of the road and stood on its hind legs as I drove past. I was stunned. In all the years I’d lived there, I’d never seen a bear from the highway.

I laughed out loud, whooped with amazement, called out to the mysterious choreographer of sychronicities, “I’ll take that as a Yes!”