GPS Devices – Fulfill your Navigation Dreams

What do you think of this valedictory address given at a local high school?
I had the pleasure of attending many high school graduations this Summer, and though by and large the speeches left me cold, this one seemed to me more compelling and better phrased, indeed richer in rhetorical device and content (despite its brevity). What’s your opinion?

Honored members of the board of education, administrators, teachers, parents, fellow students, friends… for the hundred or so young lives assembled on this stage, today marks a rite of passage from the familiar and comfortable lives we have created under the watchful and caring direction of parents and teachers to the larger, and less certain, stage that will become the rest of our lives. Today marks the day we enter the thicket and begin the larger and nobler task of forging a path — a meaningful and fulfilling path — in what we can now only imagine. There are, I am sure, many ways to become lost in this journey, and yet equally as many ways to be redeemed, actualized, and yes happy; life is difficult, but good, and fair; I want to believe that, we all do, we must. In embarking, we pause understandably to ask ourselves if we have prepared adequately for our journey, and remember our formative influences and take a measure of comfort in what they have brought us; they are part, but not all, of the riddle of finding meaning in the rest of our lives as we voyage from familiar harbors into deeper waters. Satisfied that we have prepared adequately for our journey, we pause and ask ourselves, perhaps truly for the first time, exactly where it is we are going. Can even one amongst us say with certainty, and without any trace of apprehension or misgiving, that we really know? And if we think we know, how are we to find our way there, what will keep us from steering off course, what will be our lodestar, our compass? Who amongst us can say that he can walk along the grand arc of time, along the trajectory of even one solitary life, and always keep his bearings, always be assured of reaching his destination. Indeed, how is that destination even to be chosen?
There are, in honesty, many answers, a different one for each journey, and in part each journey is about solving the riddle of that grand arc, of arriving at one’s destination intact. And if there is, for each of us, a different destination and a different arc to travel, then we are perhaps unified by one principle of navigation: we must be guided by our own individual senses of meaning, our own dreams, our own joy, and it is the darker and more mysterious journey into the self that will allow each of us to discover and plumb the wellspring of that joy. When we seem to be wandering in the wilderness, when our throats are parched, it will be that pure and refreshing water that will restore us for the rest of our journey.
Some will leave here today and directly enter the workplace; yet others will enter the armed services; many will further their educations. In each case, that decision has hopefully been made, guided, by reason, but perhaps equally by passion and commitment; follow your joy! Each decision has the potential to bring contentment, success, and none will be without occasional challenges and setbacks. And yet each can bring an individual to places of meaning, of goodness. Friends, in the many tasks that face you, face us, there is one that is perhaps greater, more daunting, and unquestionably more important than all others, one that serves as an informing principle for all the other tasks, toils and tribulations: our greatest task is to define that thing which brings us joy and nothing less and to be true to it, to be guided by it, to be redeemed in it. As we step, for the last time, from the familiar and constricted dimensions of this stage, onto a much larger and, yes, less certain one, we now can know that our chosen destinations can be achieved, that there are places of value for each of us, and that none is exalted above any other save by the passion of the quest to attain it. To each of you who finds the courage to follow his joy, defines his own success and spares no effort in breathing life and purpose into it, I offer my fondest wishes for your success, your journey.
Thank you Nancy…
This was the speech I delivered when I was 17… I am not encouraged by the observation that my writing has changed so little.

Amen. Reads just like it would if you had written it - at 17. (Happy now?)
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