We're never ready to graduate.

Graduation is getting to the top and realizing the valley that awaits.

We had been tasked to get some helium balloons to tie at the end of the driveway so people would know where the graduation party was. We’d picked three: two pink hearts and a round white “congrats” balloon.

Within an hour, only the white balloon remained; the two hearts had slipped their surly bonds and lofted upwards, exploding somewhere high above when the pressure changed.

“I feel like there’s some deep philosophy in this,” I said to my friend, looking at the lone survivor balloon. “I find graduation heartbreaking.”

My high school graduation motto was “We’ve come a long way, but not half as far as we will go,” and I still chuckle when I think about it.

How far did we come, really, when we were graduating from high school? It was high school! We complained about having to do 30 math problems for homework! I wrote in a blog post on April 9, 2006, apparently experiencing that graduation-plus-ten-years angst.¹ Mottos like ‘Our future is as big as we make it’ or ‘I can do and become anything, and no one can stop because all I have to do is think I can do and become anything and that’s all it takes’—you might want a poet to clean up that last one and make it flow—but you get my point. The power of positive thinking is severely limited by the fact that I can’t think myself rich, disease-free, or smart.

Around the time of that blog post, a group of friends, who had a good 20+ years on me, were chatting at a local Dairy Queen when we stumbled onto the topic of graduation mottos and greeting card sayings, and came up with our own list:

• Every class needs a student like you, who makes the upper 50 percent possible.

• Dare to dream the impossible, but you’ll still be flipping burgers.

• Prepare to follow your dreams, right into bankruptcy court.

• Your future is before you, including ten years of student loan repayment.

• Be prepared for exciting new chapters in life, including chapter 7.

• Dream big, choose the difficult path, and live off of the state.

We were laughing the entire time we came up with this list, but it was the kind of sad laugh only possible rooted in experience and hindsight. I was two months away from making my final student loan payment, and I could feel it.

We all instinctively knew that graduation too often rang false.

In 1985, Neil Postman, an author and cultural critic, wrote a graduation speech that he finally delivered at the BYU graduation in 2000, just three years before he died. As a professor at NYU, he’d heard many graduation speeches and decided what he would say to graduates if he had the chance.

In his speech, Postman contrasts the Athenians and the Visigoths, pointing out that these two groups represented opposite values and traditions.

The Athenians were literate, thoughtful, and logical; the Visigoths were brutish, crude, and violent. The Athenians valued knowledge, language, and reason; the Visigoths saw knowledge only as a means to get money or gain power over people. The Athenians were interested in public affairs and improving public life and behavior; the Visigoths were interested only in personal affairs and disregarded community. Athenians valued discipline and good taste in art, while the Visigoths measured artistic value only through popularity.

After the Athenians were gone, the good things of their culture still lingered and trickled on. After the Visigoths were gone, Europe entered the Dark Ages.

Postman argued that graduates must choose between two ways of living: they could live like Athenians, valuing knowledge, language, public life, art, and cultural traditions, or live like Visigoths, valuing power, popularity, convenience, and general self-interest.

“[T]o be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values,” Postman said. “Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees.”

These are two clearly competing sets of values; one or the other must be chosen with no in-between.

I think we are all aware that the Visigoths have won the day in broad, consumable culture, though some Athenians do struggle to survive and thrive. Postman’s speech is an anomaly; our graduation speeches have become self-focused, Visigoth in nature with an Athenian veneer. School has become less about knowledge and more about the ability to propel self into society instead of propelling society ahead of self.

We don’t prepare graduates very well for anything but. Self-esteem, self-identity, self-help, individual learning plans—we thought we were recognizing the individual, but instead, fed the self.

At the point of graduation, their entire remembered life is self- and school-centric, being told things like “if you flunk phy-ed, that’ll stay on your record for life” or wildly misrepresenting the importance of winning awards for sports or other activities. Too often, we get so caught up in the things that seem important to get to graduation that we miss the things that are important to eternity.

I wasn’t an athlete, but I won a lot of music and academic awards. As an unpopular kid, I took those awards to mean that someone thought I was worth something. I worked very hard for them and proudly displayed them at my own graduation party.

That was the last day those awards meant anything at all, if they ever did.

My high school diploma, in its folder, sits moldering and musty in an outdoor storage shed back at the farm, along with my high school and college graduation gowns. Nobody cares about being in Phi Kappa Phi or if you wore the summa cum laude cords when you walked the college line. They, too, are moldering.

To head off protestations, yes, those things mean something, I guess, but not what we think, not with the weight we attribute to them, and not for any amount of time compared to what we traded for them. They are all, at best, part of the many life activities that mold us bit by bit into the person we will be. They are not a waste, but they are not a pinnacle, either. We can learn just as much through terrible decisions that leave a mark.

I’d already graduated from college when Baz Luhrmann’s song “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen” came out, but I recognized what it was. When I graduated from high school, each of us in my giant class of 19 students got a copy of Life’s Little Instruction Book, and I still have it. These two things, the song and the book, are full of odd bits of advice that are surprisingly useful and mostly only arrive through the living of life. Advice from those further along in life has always had more value to me than that from those less deep in the weeds. They have hindsight where I still have future unknowns.

You still want your younger loved ones to avoid making terrible decisions, and graduation is a fearful thing because of that.

Mostly, though, you just watch them make bad decisions over and over, refusing your advice and your help—surely they are different, surely the outcome for them will be different, your warnings and admonitions are stupid—until they get old enough to watch the next generation do the same thing.

This is, perhaps, the Ecclesiastes version of graduation.

There’s always the day after graduation.

The open road is terrifying.

Deep thinkers are always taking to that open road to write about finding themselves, though I doubt many actually do. In my experience, I’ve found myself less on the wide open than I have in the quiet whisper in dark moments where you face who you are.

It’s why I wrote about the agony of being “tethered to the sky.” Having the whole world before you is terrible; suddenly, three hots and a cot seem tempting (but please don’t go that way). You can grab the world by the tail or be crushed, depending on the day.

Structure is easier.

It’s the dance we learn to recognize in life when something we knew and relied on is taken away, and there sits that ugly, open road.

No wonder there are big crashouts when, at last, you must step out of a structure and climb into the great wilderness of life. Motivation and destination must become internal; no one is handing out awards in life simply for making a grade or a touchdown. What you want to do with your life is both within and completely beyond your grasp, simultaneously.

Graduation is less a good segue and more like a dump truck over the cliff. All the glory, accolades, and attention are poured onto you in one moment, and within twelve hours, people are already expecting you to figure out what’s next and welcoming you to the rat race.

No wonder some people never leave college.

Graduation sounds like something we gradually get through before leveling up, a state of constant life achievement, but it is, like life, more like peaks and valleys. Which peak is up to you, sort of, but sometimes you don’t get to choose beyond whether you’ll climb or stumble. I guess reread Psalm 23 and trust God.

The only way to go is through.

I bought a journal and tried to gather some advice to give to the graduate whose party I was helping with. I wrote it in cursive, staying up late, trying to make it relevant, knowing how hard it is to see advice and take it for what it is until hindsight.

Avoid credit card debt. There is nothing, no romantic relationship, no job, worth more than Jesus. Feelings lie, but they are still real and need to be dealt with. The world is loud, so spend some time away from it in silence.

But what I want to say most is that there are some great things ahead, and some very hard things. No one gets through life any other way. Some days, your heart will float high, and some days it breaks.

It might all happen on the same day.

1. You may enjoy some of the comments of that old post:

I did, indeed, flip burgers at the Hampden Mall Cafe.