2016 Commencement Address: Falling Through Time
I want to welcome all of you to Commencement Exercises of the Class of 2016. Today is the culmination of many years of hard work and your engagement in an amazing learning environment. Thank you for being here and for your support of Colorado Academy and this wonderful group of students. I want to emphasize my gratitude for the parents and families of CA and all they do to make our school a special place.
Long-time NBC newsman Tom Brokaw once said, “It is easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.” Students, as you go onto look at various career opportunities; I hope that more than a few of you will consider a career in teaching and education. The world needs you in this role! The teachers who processed with the Class of 2016 today represent a faculty that truly makes a difference in the lives of young people. For the teachers at CA, this is not just a job; it is a calling. There is a saying that “School days are the best days of your life.” Now, I know we are all celebrating getting OUT of school today. But, I will tell you – there are few things in the life that actually beat school. It’s hard to see that when you are in the middle of high school, but someday you will appreciate why educational environments can be so much fun and invigorating. That’s why so many smart and talented people become educators. We get to be in an environment of ideas and relative freedom to create learning activities that inspire people. We work because we believe in the power of education to change the world. The teachers you have worked with from PreK-12 have done so much for you. We frankly cannot thank them enough for their dedication and support.
Teachers work long hours, preparing for classes, developing curriculum, grading, writing comments, writing letters of recommendation, supporting you at school events. The list goes on and on. They set high standards for your achievement. Whether you fully appreciate it now or not, the reality is that all of you will be able to -- at some point in your life—trace some success that you will experience to the lessons learned by the amazing faculty of Colorado Academy. Let’s honor them with a round of applause for their excellent instruction and support for you.
Today my theme is one of launches and landings. A Commencement Exercise is the formal way that Colorado Academy “launches” you into the world. I love the image of a rocket launch. When I was six months old, I got to see the Apollo 11 launch -- of course I don’t remember it. My grandfather was Deputy Director of NASA, and my parents smuggled me through security so they could watch the moon launch in his office. They impressed this “memory” on me as a child, and I was somewhat obsessed with NASA as young boy. I would wear my grandfather’s NASA construction helmet and pretend to be an astronaut. I loved and still love watching the old videos of a rocket launch -- the countdown, the rumble, the flakes of ice that fall off the booster engines, the scaffolding of the launch pad falling away as the rocket lifts off. Those images can be mesmerizing. The force of a launch and the fact that humans have engineered such power is inspiring. So too, is the notion that the rocket and people aboard are going into the unknown.
So, parents, I have a question for you: thinking back to when your sons and daughters were young children, how many of you threw your children high into the air and caught them as they fell into your arms? I figured as much… When I was a kid, I remember my dad just chucking me into the air. I loved it! As I became a father, I passed down the tradition. My kids would just shout, “Again, again, again.”
For our seniors… when your parents brought you to CA –either by forcing you to attend, or by supporting your choice to be here-- they were putting you on a launch pad of sorts. Now, let’s get a little scientific here. There are some key challenges we face when launching a human being into space on a rocket. We have to deal with several laws of physics. In particular, we have to deal with Newton’s First Law: “An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”
In the case of a rocket, gravity pulls on the object until thrust –through the igniting of fuel in the rocket – tilts the balance and the object rises. To understand what it takes to get out of Earth’s atmosphere, we can look at the Law of Conservation of Energy. To get to “escape velocity”— meaning escaping Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull – means a rocket needs to get to around 40,000 km/hour. In practical terms, it means that engineers have to put as much fuel as possible in that rocket to create the energy needed to achieve orbit. Kinetic energy comes from the work being done on an object. The rocket’s engine does the work as a result of burning up the fuel and lifting the rocket into space.
So when you ended up on the launch pad that is CA, the teachers spent a lot of time doing two things: filling you with the necessary intellectual “fuel” that would get you to take off, and creating learning experiences that overcome the gravitational forces that could have left you merely sitting on a launch pad. In my very, very crude analogy, the handing of a diploma is like giving you permission to turn the key to the rocket’s ignition. You are all about to take off and, we have no doubt, do amazing things. However, it is up to you to turn that key and set your direction and sights. Ultimately, it is up to you how far you fly.
We have had the privilege of seeing you take off, and we have witnessed some “suborbital” flights. There were many times, either in the classroom or the realms of arts and athletics, in which we have all seen a glimpse of your potential. We have some insight into seeing the person you are capable of becoming.
Among you are intellectuals, who think deeply about abstract and concrete problems; there are artists in your class who have used their skills and talents to create beauty and reveal elements of the human condition through their art; you have also been athletes, pushing yourselves and learning to work with others to take on a goal. In all these areas, you’ve learned a thing or two about excellence and what it takes to achieve a high level of performance. You have been forced to think deeply.
You have stepped up –in your own unique way – to meet the challenges that have been thrown in your path. You are ready to rise up and leave CA, leave your families, and chart you own adventure. Along the way, you have also made great decisions. You’ve hopefully learned from the bad ones that everyone makes. We have seen you be kind and generous. You have the potential to make a positive difference.
So, today we are poised for your take off – to rise to new heights. But, let’s interject a dose of realism here. At some point, rockets do have to land! Well, actually, most of the parts of a rocket burn up in the atmosphere. We don’t want you to burn up! You will leave here, and throughout your life you will “land” somewhere. In the short term, it’s college. But, there are other “landings” that you will have to make.
I think of “landings” as the completion of some type of task, assignment, or phase of our lives. It is when we finish something that has taken lots of time, energy, thought, and effort. Often, it is something that takes preparation. Often, it is something in which the stakes are perceived to be high. Today celebrates the completion of something important in your life.
Now how many of us have had a 10.0 landing at some point in our lives? What I am talking about here is the perfect completion to something. Could it be that time when you had a solo in choir and you absolutely killed it? Or a soliloquy in a play and you just nailed your lines and captured the emotion of your character? Could it be scoring the winning goal? Could it be “acing” that final exam in science? Or, “on-sighting” a 5.11 climb on an interim trip?
I worry about the pressure that we all put on ourselves, and certainly anything with a final or culminating moment can inspire fear and anxiety. Often these feelings dramatically undermine our state of mind and can lead us to failure or a weaker performance. I know our entire faculty would say we have all seen that moment when you have had that 10-point landing --that moment when you achieve great things.
We have also seen the 4.2 landings. We have seen you literally “face plant.” We have seen a few of you make massive mistakes. Many of you are so talented that I am not sure you have ever faced true failure, but rather just a symbolic version of something not going quite right. You will gain the life experience that will help you put these minor failings into some sense of perspective, but I know in the moment they seem huge! I actually hope you never do truly fail, but there is something demystifying about failure when you experience it. Many of you are already clued into this.
A few of you that have been in my office over the years as we talk about something that happened that wasn’t your best moment. Rarely, rarely has any mistake you have made thus far in your life affected your trajectory. Mistakes happen. But, it is how you deal with them that matters most. How will you get up and try again? Will you blame others? Make excuses? Will you forgive yourself and others? Will you get back on the saddle and try again?
`When thinking about landings, I ask History teacher Mr. Terrazas about his days as a parachute instructor and how one makes the perfect landing. His big advice: “Watch out for dust devils!” Can you imagine parachuting and running into a dust devil – or a whirlwind? You all will have “whirlwinds” in your lives – that will take you and throw you in ways that you never expect. They happen to all of us and it is pretty rare when we see them coming. But, if we are self-aware of strengths and weaknesses –w e can have a little more clarity on what issues and challenges will pop on our radar. Again, I hope you live long, peaceful lives free of conflict, but let’s be realistic. Know your support systems—know that there are all kinds of people you can go to—many of them are here today –who will stand by your for your entire life. Don’t take that for granted.
Mr. T’s other advice: “Don’t look straight down – the ground sneaks up on you very quickly. And, don’t look far out at the horizon— you will crash. It’s all about balance.”
If you saw the video of the Elon Musk rocket landing on a drone ship in the ocean, you can see how landing is the opposite of taking off. Whereas the thrust that the Falcon 9 rocket used to unbalance gravitational forces allowed for takeoff, it had to use thrust to help rebalance the forces during landing. It was a remarkable achievement that happened multiple times this year. (It is something that NASA engineers could not have envisioned as they were designing the first rockets.)
But, as we think about “landings” as a metaphor, it is important to remember that just because one has some kind of “landing” or achievement, doesn’t mean life ends at that moment. You are graduating today, but the Earth is still spinning; life continues to move forward. You can’t rest yet. You have college before you, and then possibly graduate school or your first job. You will make relationships with others; some of you will form families. Lie moves on. You will have amazing accomplishments in your life, but if you are so focused on achieving that perfect landing, you may set yourself up for unhappiness. It is important to awaken to the fact that most of what we take on as humans is never done.
For your parents, today is a milestone –they are seeing you achieve something. But, after the fanfare dies down, you and they will continue your relationships and will have to work just as hard at maintaining those relationships as you move out of the house. Likewise, professionally, you will hit some moments of great achievement. You may end up closing a big deal, or building something fantastic. But, that project or job will end. And then what?
That is why I like something Holley McBroom, our Upper School Physics teacher, told me when I was asking her about the physics of rocket launch. While describing to me what happens once a rocket reaches orbit, she related it to a state of ‘perpetual falling’ as that object orbits around the earth. I love this image. The velocity that we gained through our launch into space propels an object as it orbits the Earth. In other words, we aren’t really landing—but we are falling through time. This is related to why one experiences a feeling of weightlessness in space. We are twisting, spinning, at great speeds through our lives. There is cyclical nature to life as we go from day to day, month to month, and year to year. Among the many things we have worked to teach here at CA is resilience. Social scientist Brené Brown looked at what resilient people have in common, and she says, “If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”
As you fall, be open, be vulnerable, and enjoy the ride. Savor the view. Try a back flip. Hold onto your friends. And hold on to your memories of Colorado Academy.
Congratulations!
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