I want to start by saying a few thank yous. Thank you to all the teachers, faculty, and staff, for all the support you have given us over the past four years and especially for enabling us to have a senior year that was as close to normal as possible. Thank you to friends and family for being there for us, especially the parents in the audience. And thank you to my fellow members of the class of 2021. Congratulations to us. We’ve made it. And what a journey it's been.

When I began thinking about what I wanted to say today, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. We’ve definitely been through a lot these past four years. How was I supposed to fit all the feelings, memories, and emotions into one compact lesson that I could send you all off with? It was a struggle. I likely still would have been stuck without an idea if my mom hadn’t worked through things with me. (Thanks mom). We were sitting in her car when she reminded me of the memory. When quarantine first began, I’m sure like the rest of you, I struggled with the sudden loss of all the normal activities of high school life. The boredom was overwhelming. But then I received a text from a friend. “Wanna go for a walk?” It was something simple, and I was allowed to do it because we were outside. My friend and I could walk for hours, sometimes talking about nothing or everything, it didn’t matter. Sometimes we picked a direction, sometimes we just wandered, doing multiple laps around that neighborhood and still not wanting to go home. It was during those times that I learned the importance of walking.

This is likely the point where you’re thinking “walking? There’s nothing special about walking. It’s just the easiest way to get from one place to the next,” but I would beg to differ. There are so many things that walking can teach us. I do agree that walking is simple but I also think that is the beauty of it. We don’t have to worry about how we’re doing it or how we look to other people, we can just be. Another thing to be learned from walking is that we don’t always have to know the direction. We can wander and take time for ourselves and trust that our feet will be able to get us to where we need to be. The important thing to remember is that we are allowed to be lost. We do not have to know what comes next, or how we are supposed to get there. Sometimes our paths will be confusing. You’ll end up standing at a crossroads with four different directions to pick from and you’ll have no idea which is the one that is supposed to lead you “home” wherever that may be. You are allowed to take that moment, to slow yourself down and just be lost. Where we are right now is one of those crossroads. I will be the first to admit that I feel lost. We are leaving our familiar path and venturing on to find new ones. It is a terrifying feeling but I know that it is not a forever feeling. So I will allow myself this moment to breathe. And then I will walk across this stage and begin walking again.

The people we walk with may be just as important as “the walking” itself. Some people stay for long periods of time while others are gone in no time at all. People cross our paths, or stumble onto them, or sometimes block them entirely. We must learn to deal with these things and accept that they are part of the walking experience. Sometimes we even get pulled onto other people's paths. I likely would have stayed home for a while longer if that friend had not reached out first. My life would have been wholly different if she had not sent that text in the first place. You have the power to change other people’s paths like she changed mine. You have the power to pull people onto your path or let your paths diverge. It is entirely up to you.

Sometimes it will feel like you’re walking too slowly but that is allowed. There will be times when you have to force yourself to slow down before you burn yourself out. You don’t have to run, to be the first to everything all the time. Remember that we are allowed to take things at a walk instead of a full out sprint.

Remember there’s no race to the end, even if it seems like that sometimes. We’re allowed to take our time, to not know the direction, to go at our own speed, and bring friends along on the journey. We’re allowed our own pace.

A walking pace.