Class of 2010: Tonight, I’m supposed to be congratulating you for what you’ve done here at Bowling Green in the past four years. I am expected to tell you that you’ve achieved something marvelous and that you should be proud of yourselves for every test you have passed and every lesson you stayed awake through. I should be applauding our athletes for their hard work and dedication, and telling you that I will miss the days that I’ve had here. Above all things, I ought to be thanking the faculty, family, and friends who have supported us as we worked to reach this goal. These things are all true, but they are not the things I want to tell you on our last night as classmates.
When I first arrived here, I was new, alone, and not exactly outgoing. One of my teachers, with a tremendous amount of insight, recommended that I read T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Within its imagery and uncertainty, I found one line that later came to define the way I thought of myself, my future, and my world. T.S. Eliot asks, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” and that is what I wish to talk to you about tonight, on this momentous occasion.
Our lives, up until this point, have been laid out before us with some amount of certainty. 9th grade leads, without fail, to 10th, and onto 11th, and finally to senior year. But now, we’ve found ourselves faced with not only a crossroads, but an endless number of paths that we may take. College, technical school, jobs – they are choices that others have been trying to make for us all of our lives, and now, it is our turn to decide. I know that most of you have already made up your minds, and I find that admirable. But tonight, I want to ask something of you, something harder even than the trip that we have taken together to reach this day. I want to ask you never to settle for doing the things that you should, or the things that are the easiest. I ask that you stop at each bend in the road and ask yourself: What, in my wildest dreams, would I like to do now? Do I dare disturb the universe?
Tonight is a special night, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that even with our great excitement, we are all a little nervous and a little sad to leave the home we’ve made at Bowling Green. We will miss our teachers (if not their pop quizzes) and our friends, and we will always have memories of the place where we grew to be young adults. It may be scary to step out of our safety zone and into the world, but tonight, Class of 2010, is the night we begin to disturb our universe. Good luck and thank you.
That is a much better graduation speech than either of our speakers gave. I like it.