Today is not special
Student perspective speech by Kyle Shank ’14
Tradition suggests that I stand before all of you today to provide some personal insight into the student experience here at our college. Good manners and decorum suggest that I do so in such a way as to be a champion of the cause that we’ve shared in our educational endeavors here, whether we call that cause human ecology or something else entirely. However, honesty demands of me to speak truth to my experiences, and if I must choose which of these to follow, I think it best to be honest.
With that, I’ll be direct—much of what I have learned here and hope to share with you today revolves around two distinct phenomena: those of time and of change. It is these concepts, more than any others, which have come to have significant meaning in how I have interpreted my experiences here at COA.
It has been the very process of crafting this speech that has brought me again and again to the phenomenon of time, especially since it’s pretty hard to get an extension for a graduation speech.
These ceremonies, events, and rituals that we use to divide and demarcate our lives into compartments of meaning are wonderful. They are the forum in which we share our past experiences and find common ground for our future endeavors. Frankly, I can think of no greater pleasure than to use such a time as this moment to pause and congratulate every graduate on this stage for all of their hard work and success.
However, ceremonies like this one today also conceal a secret, one that honesty dictates I reveal: Today is not special. I do not mean to say that what we have accomplished is not noteworthy and good—it most emphatically is. What I mean is this: today is not simply some pivot in the autobiographical narrative of our lives. The conferral of a degree will not have you waking up tomorrow a different man, or a changed woman, or a newly enlightened person. More likely, we are going to wake up tomorrow with the same passions and dispassions, beliefs and disbeliefs, and good and bad qualities that we have today.
Ceremonies, like the one we are taking part in, can trick us into thinking that we’ve drawn some line in the sand between who we are and who we will become. In my case, I have been on this journey to a degree for a decade now, and I want to tell you from my experience: celebrations are always post scripts—whatever changes and growth they are marking in time have already happened to you. These observances are simply scrapbooks of the past, not guideposts for the future.
Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, said that “nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.” I could not disagree more. Time is lost by taking time. Though we may be young (sort of) now, it will not always be so. Days are numbered, and we must put those remaining to good use. The things we hope to understand, the stories we hope to tell, the situations we hope to improve—they must not wait for a stage to be crossed or a degree to be conferred. You have to do them now, without delay.
So I ask all of my fellow graduates that which I ask of myself: If you’ve put off beginning something important until after graduation, or waited until some other auspicious-seeming day to give something up, stop. Do not use events like these as an excuse to begin or to end anything in your life. Your dreams and aspirations do not need to have start and end dates, so don’t give them any.
At the start of this speech I mentioned that I wanted to talk about two phenomena. The word change has never been far from my mind since I arrived here. I imagine, for many of us, it’s the reason we came—“Life changing, world changing.” For many of us, the drive to be agents of change in a world in sore need of them can, will, and has led us to do great, wonderful things.
But sometimes in the rush to bring about change we have neglected to remember something very important: that change can be both positive and negative, and is almost never value neutral. We must remember, hard as it may be, that conservatism is not a dirty word—a resistance to rapid change does not itself imply some kind of moral failing or cowardice.
In fact, if we are to be honest with ourselves, many of the most radical beliefs and arguments that many of us here hold dear are rooted in a stronger conservatism than many would care to admit. The arguments we make here about things like climate change, or the conservation of public lands, or perhaps more local issues, like student participation in faculty reviews, or our trimester system, are ones that we are deeply passionate about.
Yet deep down our worries about the future of the institutions we hold most dear express an inherently conservative view of the world, one that is radically skeptical of rapid (or at times any) change. This is intuitive, as the pain wrought by unexpected change is something that all of us have felt in some manner or another, be it personal or professional. Assuming that most, if not all, of us will become the champions of causes large and small in the years stretching before us, I only ask that we remember these pains and approach our future endeavors to change our worlds with wisdom, grace, and humility. Sometimes being effective, compassionate agents also means knowing when it isn’t yet time to do so.
I realize that, in speaking these things, I have really asked all of us to hold two dissonant thoughts in our minds: to make haste with that which we do, and at the same time to temper that hasty rush to change the world with a healthy bit of thoughtful reflection. I hope that this kind of seemingly paradoxical advice isn’t too bothersome, as the remainder of our lives will be preoccupied with balancing such contradictions.
But perhaps I’ve been wrong from the start and today need not be the day to be preoccupied with such things. While it is true that you might not wake up a different person tomorrow because you’ve graduated from College of the Atlantic, you’ll still wake up with the experiences, knowledge, and wisdom you’ve gained here; and you’ll wake ready to change at least one world—your own. Thank you.
