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Graduation Advice: Moments

Walking around outside this time of year always gets me nostalgic.  I don't remember the exact date, but I know it was sometime between late April and early May.  I know the year was 1997, and I was about to graduate from college.  I remember sitting on the outdoor green quad area with some friends from my major department.  I remember our books and composition notebooks spread out around us. (Way before laptops, you know.) We weren't really studying so much as taking it all in.....all of it.....the books, the campus, the friendships....knowing it was all about to end.  I can still to this day remember the sweet, delicious freedom of that moment.  We didn't know what was ahead, but we thought we did.  And that promise was our everything. 

I look back on that time now with a lot of bittersweet joy and heartbreak.  Some of those friends went on to do everything they said they would.  Some of them had lives that turned out exactly as they expected.  I did not.  Nothing really turned out the way I expected, but I don't say that with any kind of regret.  It feels more like a learning curve that continued even after I graduated, and I'm grateful for that.

The campus is even different now too.  It barely resembles what we were surrounded by on that spring day twenty years ago.  But just like the changes in us from students to adults, that change is meant to and must happen. 

I think of so much advice I'd like to give young graduates this time of year.  Don't think you have to have it all figured out!  Don't settle down to fast!  Don't settle.....for anything!  Don't stop learning! Don't stop believing!  (Okay, a little Journey jumped in there, sorry.) There are too many "don'ts" in those directions.  Let me rephrase.....

Live your life!  Take chances!  Travel!  Find yourself!  Make mistakes!  Begin once and then begin again!  It doesn't matter if you're 22 or 25 or 30.  Life only has two true starting and ending points: birth and death.  All the rest in between is moments.  There will be moments that feel like beginnings and others that feel like endings, but believe me, they're still all moments.


It's funny how graduation feels like an ending to some but a beginning to others.  I think back then I felt like it was a definite beginning.  I think I'd go back and tell young Becky that she was all wrong.  It was only a moment.  Just like sitting on that lawn with friends was a moment.  The birth of my son was a moment.  My wedding(s).  Both of them were moments.  I hope one day I'll look back and remember all of them....the good and bad, big and small.  And I look forward to all the ones that still haven't happened yet.  All those moments. 


So I'm gonna go ahead and take back all that earlier advice and simply say this: remember the moments.  Live them.  Keep them.  Savor them.  Remember them.  One day you will have lost your golden tassle and won't remember where you stored your prom dress.  But hopefully you will still have the moments.  And those are worth as much as all the years of education and then some.


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