SHANA BLACKMAN

Good morning Class of 2017. As an American University School of Communication graduate, it is an honor for me to be here before you all, commemorating this milestone. To begin, we all have those people in our lives who are bottomless pits of advice. No matter the situation, they are always apt to comment. With the best intentions, they could go on for hours with theories and anecdotes. We sit, we hear. We don’t really listen.  That’s not exactly what we wanted to hear when we didn’t get the internship we wanted. When we failed an exam for the first time. When we had a terrible day but didn’t know why.

 

I can hear my grandparents lecturing me now, pulling quotes out of who knows where. Using stories about when they were my age to try to put things in perspective. In those low moments, feigned acknowledgment and thanks would allow me to retreat back to whatever was bothering me. It didn’t really hit me until I got older, that all of their “nonsense” actually made perfect sense. It is likely that graduation seems surreal, maybe even incomprehensible in this moment, but if you take your next steps with these three pieces of my grandparents’ advice in mind, I can assure you, you’ll never go wrong.

 

The first is a quote that my grandparents are caught repeating every time my life takes an unexpected turn: “You plan, they laugh.” You all have been conditioned to follow a set plan that takes you from pre-school to college graduation. You’ve reached the last stop in this predetermined plan. Not only is now a time to embrace the unknown, but also it’s the time to recognize that you may stray from the path and that is perfectly okay. In fact, the most unexpected events guide you to the best opportunities. I urge you to consider this perspective-altering quote upon hitting your first roadblock. “You plan, they laugh,” a way to remind yourself that your thorough, check-box life plan may not actually be what is best for you. It takes a metaphorical “bird’s eye view” to realize that being flexible and adjusting to reality is what creates your life plan.

 

This “life plan” can also be influenced by the people in your life, which brings me to my grandparents’ next piece of advice: “Friends for a reason, friends for a season, friends for a lifetime.” Keeping this prophetic phrase in mind as you meet people will help you quantify your relationships. No matter the situation, the people surrounding you have affected you in some way. Whether it’s the kid who stole your toy in daycare or your first college roommate, every relationship that you’ve had thus far has molded you into the person you are today. From group project partners to best friends, people may come and go, but make sure you embrace them for all that they are. Most importantly, when you find those “friends for a lifetime,” which some of you may have found in your undergraduate years here at American University, realize that they came into your life for a reason and don’t let them go.

 

Speaking of reasons, the third, and most cliché, piece of advice that my grandparents have echoed throughout the years is, “Everything happens for a reason,” and if Marilyn Monroe said it, it must be true. I know what you’re thinking. You’ve heard this before, and it’s just what people tell themselves to compensate for the fact that something went wrong. I was in the same boat as you. Yet, I came to realize that the advice wasn’t meant to be a magical spell and saying it wasn’t going to fix anything. It was more a matter of changing my perspective, filling a half-empty glass, and acknowledging that life is an adjusting game. This is the case for each of these widely known phrases impressed upon me by my all-knowing grandparents.

 

As you sit here, jittery, about to graduate and start a new part of your life, you may not have comprehended everything that I have just said. However, I know that in due time, your memory bank will serve you and you’ll realize that all of those times you thought words were going in one ear and out the other, you were actually listening. The advice will kick in when it’s needed, and you’ll catch yourself addressing situations with a different point of view. That’s all graduating is really about. It’s looking at your path from a different perspective. In all, if you take nothing else from this address, let it be, appreciate the bottomless pits of advice; we’re lucky we have them to guide us.