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Welcome faculty, board members, family, and friends. None of us would be sitting here today without your support, so I would like to extend an immense thank you to all of you. I would also like to congratulate and welcome my fellow members of the Class of 2017. Some people say that the four years you spend in high school will be the best four years of your life. Though I’m sure we’ll all miss staying up until 2 am to finish our homework, attending weekly advisory meetings, and eating unidentifiable cafeteria offerings, if we believe that these have been the best years of our lives, we are drastically underestimating our capacity to become happier, more successful people once we walk across this stage. Look around - we are a group of 200 something 17 and 18 year olds. To say that our best years are behind us once we move that tassel to the other side would just be sad, and, fortunately, untrue. Though we may not have yet reached the prime of our lives, we have all learned a lot. We’ve learned that bringing a fog machine to spirit week isn’t the best idea, that spray painting a rock over and over again can become a treasured tradition, and that you can’t have a BBQ in the school parking lot in the middle of the school day. These experiences and lessons will act as a foundation that we will build off of as we move forward. I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned and realized during my highschool experience. You should never let someone else’s negativity keep you from pursuing something you love. I’ve experienced negativity in many areas of my life - academic, extracurricular, and personal - but I have always persevered, and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here today. In the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of you, or of the path you are taking - so long as it is constructive. You are the most important judge of whether or not what you are doing is worthwhile. In the wise words of the English novelist Will Self, “A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.” Life is a beautiful, fragile thing, but it is never easy to experience it as such. It is easy to forget, in this age of rapidly advancing technology where effort is often taken out of the equation, that the only way our lives are going to turn out how we want them to is if we proactively take control of them and engineer our own experiences. In the past two years, I’ve developed extensive food allergies that have made eating anything a challenge, but instead of giving up, I worked hard to make my own recipes and find things that I could eat, at times going to considerable creative measures, such as learning how to combine turkey, chicken, rice, and carrots in 113 different ways. The truth is, a life worth living isn’t an effortless life. There’s no such thing as a meaningful ‘free ride’ - unless, of course, it’s a free ride to college. After all, you cannot expect to get more out of life than you put in, and the same goes for education. My unwavering effort in school has provided me with a variety of opportunities that I have
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never taken for granted, and would not have had access to if I had instead focused on how many Netflix seasons I could binge-watch. Life is short. The world is huge, and, comparatively, each of us is very small. At times, it seems as though nothing any one of us does will have the slightest impact on our own lives, let alone the lives of other people. If that feeling ever arises, think of the Butterfly Effect - which is the idea that something as small as the death of one butterfly can significantly change the future. Every single little thing each of us does has an undeniable effect on what our collective future will look like. So next time you swat a fly, turn right instead of left, or decide to eat that last slice of pizza - just think, you may have just permanently altered the future. That being said, no one can foresee exactly what is to come. All we have is the certainty of the present, and the potential for so much more to unfold as we take these first steps forward as high school graduates. Whether you are going on to college, to the military, to the workforce, or anywhere else, whether you will be crippled by student loan debt, bravely defending our country, or happily collecting a weekly paycheck, I urge you to remember that these four years we are closing a door on tonight should not, and will not, define the rest of our lives.
