Finishing High School
As the school year draws to a close, many young people are standing on a Threshold. For 12 years, their world has been school, hopefully a place where they have been nurtured, engaged and learned skills that they will use in their adult life. For some this world may have thrown up daily challenges, social and academic battles, and for others, who thrived and blossomed in this world, it will be difficult for them to imagine life without it.
Threshold co-director Sarah Lockwood drew on the wisdom of poets and philosophers as she shared her thoughts about this particular life moment at a valedictory service.
TO THE GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 2019,
What a moment you are in. You are no longer subject to the rhythms and rituals that have been your school days, weeks and years for so long. You are in liminal space, (at a threshold) no longer part of this past season of life and not quite yet in the next season.
This liminal space is a time of unknowing, uncertainty and great potential.
There is a lot to unravel, in school communities we are used to routine and order, bells and uniforms. Some of you have finished your exams and are waiting for friends to finish too. Some of you are wondering how you might like to mark this moment. Many of you might be wondering what on earth you are going to do with your life now that all of that is over.
May I suggest? Breathe. Linger in the liminal. Embrace the not-knowing.
And maybe, if you feel like it, sit with some life-giving questions from some of our most trusted elders.
The great poet Mary Oliver asks:
“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
The civil rights leader Howard Thurman prompts us to resist the common questions:
“Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what brings you fully alive and do that. For what the world needs are people who are fully alive.”
We have a culture that likes to tell us a lot about what we should and must do. What we should have achieved by certain moments, what we should look like, who we should spend our time with, even what we should think. A friend of mine reacts strongly to these musts and shoulds:
“don’t should all over me” she says when she hears me use that word.
Shoulding on other people can be very harmful. It can drown out their own inner voice. An inner voice is easily quietened. It is shy and needs time and space to be heard. There’s no need to rush this voice. There’s time. Life is made up of tiny moments. In each moment we are learning more about who we are- what our vocation might be.
The educator Parker J. Palmer describes vocation like this:
“Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live — but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.
Vocation is not goal to be achieved but a gift to be received. “
What can I be wholehearted about?
What brings me fully alive?
What will you do with this one wild and precious life?