Embrace the moment, not regrets

Some people are expressing little but regret over the fact that high school graduations across the country, Lake Roosevelt’s included, will not be what anyone had in mind this year.

That much is certain, but, graduating class, it’s also true that if you’ve learned anything in your dozen or so years in school so far, you’ve likely learned to roll with the punches and make the best of the situation in which you find yourself.

There is no course syllabus or homework for that. But our current situation is the best lesson (call it your final high school lesson) that you could hope for.

I’ll guarantee you that decades from now you’ll still remember it, which is more than I can say for my own graduation, which featured (I think) the usual speech from some adult to whom no one listened.

We were all focused, as high school graduates will do, on the future. Scary or beautiful, life was looming just over the horizon, whether that meant college or a job or the military.

Ready or not, here it comes. And the single most valuable thing that you have learned did not come from coursework, cannot be measured by GPAs or SAT scores: the flexibility and the will to make it in life, and the skill of doing the best you can with what you’ve got right now.

And at this moment, grads, you’ve got a lot.

Including a whole lot of future and a lifetime of opportunities to make the most of it. You live in a country that makes that far more likely than many others in the world. And you’re about to enter a world that is ready for you to mold it, right after a crisis.

Think about that last point. The world is not going to be the same as it was when your parents grew up. Our world has been changing at an increasing rate for decades, but now that’s truer than ever. You just stumbled into tremendous opportunity, getting in on the ground floor of building the future of the world.

Get started right by embracing what you’ve got and what’s ahead, not mourning over what will never be.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher