Graduation Day

This is a slightly edited version of a blog post I wrote last year.

Last Saturday was graduation day in both Gettysburg and Onida, and probably some other places, too.   It’s an important day, of course.  It’s a day some people will never forget.  Mostly, those people are called “parents” or “grandparents”.  Sometimes, they’re called “great-grandparents”.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an important day for the students, too.  But the importance of it comes at us more in retrospect than it does at the time.  For the most part, I’m guessing the students themselves will probably not find this day all that memorable. 

If that seems wrong, let me ask you:  how much do you remember of your high school graduation?  Maybe you’re different from me, but I remember very little of mine.  I remember the speaker because it was Bill Janklow, who was the state attorney general at the time.  But I can’t remember anything he said.  I can’t remember who came to my graduation party, other than my parents.  I can’t remember the moment that I received my high school diploma.  I really can’t remember much of anything of my high school graduation.

I suspect, though, that if you asked my parents, they could probably tell you a lot about that day.  They could tell you what I said in my valedictorian speech (I have no idea).  They could tell you who gave me my diploma (I don’t know).  They could tell you each person that was at my graduation party.  They could probably even tell you what they served.  My high school graduation was a much bigger deal for them than it was for me.  And I suspect that will be true of a lot of parents this week, too.

There are a lot of reasons for that.  I think one of them, though, is that as we get older, we start to savor moments more.  When we’re young, we’re often too busy living our lives, going from one thing to the next, to stop and savor the moment we’re in.  As we get older, though, we start to realize that life is not all that long.  The moments we have become more important to us, and we try to remember everything about them, because we don’t know how many we may have.

Neither of those approaches is wrong.  In fact, they’re really both appropriate for their time.  When we’re young, it’s appropriate that we move from one thing to the next.  It’s appropriate that we spend our time just living our lives.  We don’t want young people weighed down with the thought that life is short.  Their lives are just beginning.  We need young people to be enthusiastic about their lives.  But when we’re older, it’s appropriate that we start to feel the passage of the years, and that we start to appreciate things more. It shows, again, how right the book of Ecclesiastes is when it says there is a time for everything and God has made everything beautiful in its time.

So, if the graduating high school seniors don’t appreciate graduation day as much as their parents and grandparents do, it’s okay.  Let them keep looking forward to the next thing.  In fact, encourage them to do that.  They’ve still got lots of next things ahead of them.  And some of those next things just could be amazing.