WEST-WORD: Commence Again

By Sadhana Seelam

In India, there is the wedding season. In a large section of the West, there is the commencement season. Spanning the weeks between mid-May and mid-June, the season includes ceremonies across the spectrum of undergraduate and graduation ceremonies.

Invited speakers range from icons like Winston Churchill, who gave his speech at Harrow School in the UK in 1941 to Steve Jobs, Apple's legendary co-founder, who addressed the students at Stanford University in 2005, to JK Rowling, who addressed the students of Harvard University in 2008, to Hillary Clinton this year at her alma mater, Wellesley College.

These will likely belong in the ' Hall of Fame of Commencement Speeches,' save for the fact that my vote would be for Clinton's first speech at Wellesley as a graduating senior in 1969, which offers a prescient window to the person she eventually became. All of these speeches are in the public domain and make for worthy reading/listening.

There is no set format for speeches of this nature. Speakers, especially of the ilk cited above, are known to be celebrated thinkers and have often spoken widely in the public domain. Speakers endeavor, however, to organize their life experiences and learning, packaging and presenting to sponge-like minds on a day that marks their marriage to freedom, relinquishing them from parents and guardians. Graduation speeches (used synonymously with commencement speeches fairly often) nevertheless offer a moment of reflection for both the speech giver and his or her audience.

While graduation speeches happen at every 'graduating' phase of learning, as young students step up from elementary school into middle school and from middle to high school and then on to college, the stage for the completion of the undergraduate or baccalaureate program garners the greatest attention as a ceremonial rite of passage and the event draws the biggest celebrities to speak.

I've been to graduation ceremonies of my own children many years ago, and those of others where I've observed parents of graduating students soaking in the advice as much as their children, if not more. One of the virtues of getting older and reaching our forties, fifties and beyond, is relinquishing our children from our hovering attention into becoming people we know who we happen to love.

I recall Arundhati Roy's comment in relation in her phenomenal book, The God of Small Things, where she recognizes her mother with this unforgettable line, 'Who loved me enough to let me go.' That is a lofty but entirely worthy kind of love to aspire to. It is graduation time for both the parents and students alike. It's time for parents to graduate from helicoptering their children and make room for them to mature, make their own mistakes and hopefully grow from them.

When parents pack the last of their children into dorm rooms as they enter freshman year, they become 'empty-nesters.' Adjusting to a schedule that does not include provisioning for dependent children takes getting used to. It calls for refocusing and gives permission to the parents to recommence on aspirations shoved aside in the years of helping children grow up to be successful people.

What may help, but is somewhat hard to put into context readily, especially when we need handy advice on being classy parents is to remember that life as we know it on earth is an accidental congruence of events that evolved over millions of years to produce us. Reminding ourselves of this cosmic backdrop may help us reconcile with our limitations for altering the course of our children's lives once they've crossed this key, symbolic threshold.