The Newsy Neighbour Magazine
June Issue 104
All Rights Reserved
www.thenewsyneighbour.com
It’s graduation season. Soon, students with be adorning their
caps and gowns, and walking across the stage, picking up their diplomas,
degrees or certificates, to the applause of friends, family and faculty. Traditional
amongst all the pomp and circumstance, there will be a Commencement Speech –
words of wisdom and inspiration offered to the graduates to bolster them up and
motivate them on their way to joining the real world.
Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity
to cross the stage in a cap and gown splendor three times. It stands to reason
that I’ve also sat through three of these Commencement addresses. I remember
nothing. Not one word. Three speeches that were given to empower and motivate
me, and all I have from them is a vague recollection that one of speakers was
an athlete – maybe a synchronized swimmer, maybe. Now, knowing I won’t be
tossing a cap in the air ever again, I have gathered the advice I wish I would
have heard, or at least remembered from my graduation.
Dear Graduating Class of 2016,
Congratulations, you have just completed one of the easiest
stages of your life. Celebrate your achievements, enjoy your graduation, but
please, by all that is holy, do not make this the best day of your life. Don’t
even make it one of the top ten best days of your life. Really, it shouldn’t
even appear on the list of the best days of your life. The best truly is yet to
come if you are just brave enough to go and get it.
Oh, but what is to come? Life. Life is to come in all its
splendid, messy, happy, depressing, ugly and beautiful glory. Life should be an
adventure. Imagine you’re on a cruise and day after day after day you do the
same thing; get up at the same time; eat the same food; read the same book;
have the same conversation with the same person. Life on repeat. Ya, that’s not
much of a life and certainly not an adventure. It might be comfortable, it
might feel safe, but really, what a waste. Toss aside your preplanned, neatly
organized map of life and just keep the destination in mind.
Get out there and live life to its fullest. Don’t take any
job just to say you have one. Get a survival job if you have to, but keep
marching towards your dreams. Think of the Hollywood elite. Kanye West worked
at The Gap. Mathew Morrison from Glee also worked at The Gap. Harrison Ford was
a carpenter. Eva Mendes sold hotdogs at a mall. Whoopi Goldberg was a makeup
artist – for the dead. Honesty, she worked for a funeral home, applying makeup
to the deceased. It was a bit of a dead-end career (pun intended). Now imagine
if they had given up; decided that the safe paycheque was enough and that maybe
the casting and music directors that kept saying “no” were right. Star Wars
without Han Solo – terrible, and no Indiana Jones, say it ain’t so. The View
without Whoopi - dull. Award shows without Kanye, okay maybe that’s not the
best example.
JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, was told by
an editor not to quit her day job. So she didn’t, but she didn’t quit her dream
either and the last two books in the Harry Potter series went on to set the
record as the two fastest selling books in history. Oh and JK also went on to
become a billionaire… yes with a “B” billionaire.
Life is full of obstacles. People and situations are going
to get in your way. People are going to say no to you. You aren’t going to get
every job you interview for. Bills will pile up and you will need to pay them. This
is the messy, depressing and ugly part of life. It is up to you how you deal
with those obstacles. Are you going to quit when you come across a road block
on the road to life or you going to go and blaze a path around it? Sometimes,
when we are navigating around the roadblocks, we find things we would have
missed out on otherwise; new friends, new opportunities, new passions and
goals. These are the times life is splendid, happy and beautiful.
It takes courage to go off path, to step away from the safe
and familiar. Off path, however might just be where you find your adventure. So
go ahead and be brave, take the path less traveled. And if you happened to
surpass JK Rowling’s sales record, feel free to make a detour to my house.
Congratulations. I wish you all an adventure to last your
lifetime.
Gaylene Smith
has always enjoyed the road less traveled and lives in fear of living life on
repeat. She hopes her sons will always detour around life’s roadblocks instead
of stopping that part of their journey. Gaylene currently works at McBride
Career Group in Strathmore and would love to hear about your destination.
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