Dance Like Everyone Is Watching

Dance As If Everyone Was Watching...

This will be my fourth unasked-for Graduation Speech, but I feel compelled to give it anyway.

What in the world can I possibly say in a graduation speech to the class of 2020? You are going through the weirdest time and arguably the oddest graduation ever. I heard of an actual graduation in which the graduates were going to receive their diplomas from a Ferris wheel. Riding around a football field in a car with your parents to get your diploma doesn’t even sound weird anymore.

You will have missed the prom, the all-night party, and the after all-night party. You will miss giving everyone big hugs, writing in their yearbooks, promising to keep in touch, and telling them you love them (even if at that point you don’t quite remember their names). You will miss the look of pride and a smattering of fear on the faces of your family. You will miss waking up late the next afternoon, not believing that you actually graduated and cautiously contemplating your future.

I am actually pretty bullish about your future though.

In the first place you are going to have the most spectacular reunions ever because your whole class has gone through this strange time together. You know how on TV they keep saying “We’re all in this together”? Well, your class really is. No one else on earth will know what it is like graduating in the time of Corona, and that is going to hold you together like no other class.

I don’t feel sorry for you. All of you “Gens” have been given the chance to create a “brave new world”. It’s as if the world has been made clean just for you. There is almost nothing we haven’t screwed up so you have a lot to work with. We, the other generations, are famously and desperately afraid of change, and if nothing else, change is coming. You will be the generation that understands that fact and are experiencing it in real time. You will know that things are not always predictable. Out of that unpredictability can be born change that is good, change that is healthy and change that you are not afraid of.

Kipling said in his famous poem “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”…and at the end of the poem he sums up, “you will be a man my son” (Sorry girls, different time). Alan Watt, the premier British philosopher, said “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it and join the dance.”,

You are going to “join the dance” like no other group in history because this is like no other time in history.

You, my dear sweet Class of 2020, will have the chance to change the future….and do it with knowledge and bravery, and a really cool dance.