Commentary: Graduation Day: Holding on while letting go

It's the end of what your parents' friends reminiscently call "the best years of your life," and you're sitting with your class in a stadium surrounded by people, listening to a graduation speech. Some of these people you know. Some of them you're very close to. Most of them you will never see again, which is fine, you think. The speaker says something about how your future is full of hope. And this gets you thinking, because it seems untrue, maybe. Or it somehow misses the truth of what you feel at this moment, a profound sense of loss.

You were out with your friends the other night, and when the bar stopped serving drinks, you all went back to your place. Your dorm or house or apartment was already starting to look like it did when you first moved in, the walls a bit more bare than normal, your things already finding their way into boxes. And you thought to yourself that you would never again have this group of people around you in this place, and that even if you did, it could never again feel like this. Why does this night have to end? Your friends were slipping away. You hugged them with an urgency that was never there before. You were at a loss for words.

Your parents and maybe the rest of your family came to see you graduate. They walk around campus with you and comment on how beautiful it is. And you simply repeat, "Yeah, this place is so beautiful." And although it looks like you're agreeing with them, you're actually saying something very different. But it's all the same to them. "Beautiful," your mother says. "Go stand over there. I want to take your picture." Even as it's being taken, you know that the picture won't quite capture what you mean when you say it's beautiful here.

In the last few days, or maybe this whole last semester, you've had a new sense of what is valuable to you. You're filled with an aching awareness of how the world could be and always should be, but now is not. You want to do something. You want peace and justice and human decency, things you never knew you wanted. Or rather, things you imagine you always wanted, but there's a kind of newness to the ideas, a kind of immediacy. You say things that aren't exactly what you mean -- graduation one-liners. They're somehow inaccurate, disconnected even. But in the moment, they're the only words you find. You look your best friend in the eyes, and tearing up, you say, "Go out and be somebody," as if he hadn't been somebody all along. "You're gonna change the world," you say. "You've got so much potential."

Today is Mother's Day. When your friends meet your mother, they may tell you how much you look like her. "He's got my eyes," she says, although you both know it runs much deeper than that. It's something that maybe you would try to explain if, like when you were little, you would allow yourself such naked displays of affection -- or if you could find the words to explain it. But you feel connected to your mother in a different way today, in that she too is trying to say something, and finding herself at a loss. She says she's so proud of you. Says you look so good in that cap and gown. Says you've grown up so fast.

For a moment you tune in to what the graduation speaker is saying. You might hear, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." And although the phrase itself is stupid, and you've heard it a thousand times before.. And for your mother, who was with you on the very first day of your life, not to mention some time before, you imagine it means something also. Something different probably, but not untrue. The speaker says you're at a unique point in history. Says something about how you're one of the best-educated people in the most powerful country in the world. He talks about the power that's about to come into your hands, and about responsibility. You're sitting there thinking about your friends and your mother and the words of this speech are weaving in and out of your thoughts, wrapping around them. And all at once it hits you. That all these things that people say at graduation aren't about responsibility. They're about love.

You think maybe that the truth of this graduation speech is that, of all the power that's about to be placed in your hands, the greatest is undoubtedly the power of love. But you can't say this. Not to your friends. You say, "Go out and change the world." "Go out and be somebody." Of course you mean these things. But what you mean is that changing the world is making its problems your own, which is an act of love. What you mean is that being somebody is paying attention to what touches you, what moves you, what makes you laugh, and what fills you with the urge to do something. It's a matter of loving yourself and loving what you do.

You think again about that photograph. You think if you could somehow explain the expression on your face in that moment. If you could ever find the words to tell it right, how in the turn of your mouth or the shielding of your eyes from the sun, you seemed a little bit taller, but you seemed almost lonely. If you could just capture the pale brilliance of that sunlight, how it felt like part of you was washed away, then you would believe what your mother believed when she was looking through that camera --that graduating from college is about growing up.