Season of Graduation

Graduations are always exciting. You move on from one step in your life to another. It's a foray into the unknown. Up until that point your life is structured for you in one way or another. You have a set schedule. You have set parameters you have to lie within. You have set locations you need to be and set times that you need to be there. Namely classes to sign up for, attend, and pass. No matter the graduation, be it Kindergarten, Middle School, High School, College, or Grad School. You can step across that stage and step into your future. As unsure as you may be regarding it, it is waiting for you there at the bottom of those steps along with your mother's outstreched arms.

When it was your kindergarten graduation your future included full days of school maybe a bus ride and cafeteria lunches.

The steps off the stage at your middle school graduation symbolized a step into adulthood, or at least seemed to at the time. They were steps into your last phase of youth, steps into your indepenence. It would be four short years before you realize how small these steps really were toward your future.

High school graduation was the biggest step for me, it symbolized moving on to adulthood. Being in charge of your own life. True independance. Real choices. A big world in front of you and sometimes it looked so large it was scary. Although you spend your last year of high school making the looming choices of what comes after graduation, you take those steps off the stage into an unknown where you will be the only one to make the choices that define your future. As you step down each step, the weight of your future rests on your shoulders and as you reach the bottom, so does the weight of your mother's arms.

For some that is the end of their formal graduations. From here on out, you graduate in different steps and all your friends and classmates scatter to the winds and you each make your future. You could move on to your college graduation, some to graduate school, others to marriage and children, others to career paths unknown.

Whatever your graduation this spring, congratulations!