Thank you, class of 2021. Welcome, parents, educators, and Board members. As Mike introduced, I’m Amy Heusterberg-Richards -- also known here at Bay Port simply as HR. Some of you graduates might have been young learners in my Writing or Literary Analysis classes. Some of you might have written with me, app essays and more, last year in College & Career. And about 80 of wonderful you joined me this school year in IB English 12. I was up at this podium once before, though in the stuffy, crowded gym that time. The speech I offered to the Class of 2017 remarked about the beauty in revising -- a writing metaphor, of course. I asked those graduates to embrace change -- in their life plans, their own minds, their perceptions of other people. You all, though. You don’t need me to talk about revision. These past fifteen months, you’ve lived change. Your junior prom, your senior Homecoming, your extracurricular seasons, your Bay Port schedule... your interactions with teachers and friends and family. This ceremony. In our nation, you've experienced changes in leadership. You've seen people march in the streets for racial change and heard discussions assessing change in technology and media and justice and healthcare and climate and wages and so much more. Beyond this community and this country, our world has known a global change of millions of unexpected lost lives. You don’t need me to encourage you to try new experiences or consider new possibilities. One of the course norms you IB students wrote this September was the ideal to (quote) “create a place where vulnerability is celebrated.” So... I’m a little intimidated up here, this time, in truth. And I’m nervous that folks out there are taking expectant breaths hoping I do push or don't push for certain ideological change in this divided nation. I have hopes for your distant futures, but I’m not sure what they’ll look like. I have strived to help prepare you for them... but there are days, especially of late, that I wonder how much stamina I have left for this profession. Next month, next year, next decade fill my mind with question marks. So, how do I advise you in this moment? Fully vulnerable, here's what I can share -- not in predicting forward, as might be the usual in years unlike this one, but in reflecting back: When I first met many of you three years ago, I was deep in personal grief. My dad, a Vietnam Veteran, had just passed away from a rare and immediate heart attack attributed to Agent Orange. Whether you noticed or not, many of those days I could barely walk out my front door to come here to work. Right before my dad unexpectedly passed, he did a fairly typical thing as the family-centered handyman he was: He drove an hour to my house and, while Mr. Richards and I were overwhelmed with young children and long work hours, Dad finished winterizing our home. One specific help: he unhooked our garden hose and carried it from the backyard into storage in our basement. We buried him the afternoon of that season’s first freeze. In my darkest moments, I spent a lot of time sitting on a cold basement floor with that bright green, dad-placed coil of hose. Later I cuddled up on the basement stairs and looked at it. I could describe for you now every detail of its pattern, its dimples, its tarnished nozzle. Later still, in moments of heaviness as I moved within my house, I would pause to reflect on that hose while standing just outside the top basement door. And then I sat on the living room couch, a whole floor away, thinking of the garden hose and my loss of who last touched it -- sometimes still with tears. Other times, though, with smiles. This past school year, we have been deep in collective grief. We’re mourning our expectations of what these months might have looked like. The extra time we could have spent together face-to-smiling-face. We're mourning a colleague and teacher. Perhaps family members and certainly global neighbors. We’re mourning how we might have previously understood predictability... trust... civil discourse. Sometimes you can’t see beyond the darkness of such moments, think outside the basement. You struggle to imagine past the heaviness of grief to foresee a future without a beloved individual or an expected experience. You can’t grasp hold of a hope that feels far, far away. All you can first do sit in stillness. Cry. Yell. Frankly, feel whatever emotions you need -- without reservation, without judgement. Then, when you know it's time to continue -- and this time will always come, you proceed. You move off the basement floor and up a single stair with one. small. step. (My six-year-old would sing Anna’s “do the next right thing.”) But before Frozen II, novelist E. L. Doctorow suggested people think about life's challenges “like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make a whole trip that way." We might not know what world you, your children, or your grandchildren will inherit -- but in the next minute, the next hour, the next day... we can do “next steps” as intentionally and as courageously as we’re able. We won't move “on” from these challenging times, but I do know we can move forward. Seeing the small next parts on which our headlights shine, we can travel farther and farther down any road. And we can bring our memories and our growth and our life-lived wisdom with us. Your headlights shine next on leaving this ceremony. As you do that, thank those who have supported you, in the moments that went as planned and in the darker moments filled with “a hundred visions and revisions.” Tomorrow, whatever you may be up to, travel forward with the lessons these months have taught you: How to be brave. To think of others. Be creative. Adaptable. Silly, laughing when the absurdity of life doesn’t give clear answers. Remember, as you journey in the days beyond, that you won’t always be able to see your destinations clearly. Life will get hard again. But you’re here today. You’ve already navigated to this place. You can continue doing the next small thing and the next small thing and the next, following your headlights through any darkness. Small distance by small distance, you will again find yourselves in moments like this one on this field. You’ll feel satisfaction. Pride. Connections to those around you, regardless if you look or think or vote or worship similarly. At these destinations, also allow yourself to feel a giddy, childlike joy. Not the type that naively expects light to continue always. But the kind of joy that knows, step by step, you can lift yourself off any dark basement floor. From your entire academic careers and from these especially trying months, you’re wiser and you’re stronger. Greater still, you now possess the knowledge and the empathy to comfort others when they navigate with little light. If ever in doubt, there are next steps that will never steer you wrong: Quiet your own voice so there’s room for those other people’s. Remember you can’t know everything (and then trust the expertise of people whose experiences and education can guide you). Create and enjoy art. Talk with people more than about them. Eat delicious food. Notice & appreciate the overlooked but much-labored contributions of your peers. Travel. See potential in the unexpected. Push back against injustices and through the temptation to be a bystander. Hand-write your cards. As Frau would remind us, see the humanity in all the people with whom you share this community and this world. And, whenever the moment’s right: be vulnerable. My next step is to head home. Someday soon, in bright sunshine, I’ll smile as I hook Dad’s garden hose to a sprinkler in my backyard. Then I’ll watch my own children giggle and play over its now-opened coils. I promise to think of you and your futures in that moment that followed many small next steps. Congratulations, graduates. You deserve all the light of today. I’m honored to know you. I’m better from reading your words and hearing your ideas. I’m awed by the strength you’ve already shown. And I’m so so eager for the tomorrows you will create. "You [can] make this place beautiful," one small step at a time. Thank you.
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