Last night, we all attended a fabulous college graduation party for a dear family member (a cousin once removed essentially). We had a lovely time at Olivia’s in Hoboken celebrating the graduate, which really got me thinking. Why do we celebrate graduates?

We celebrate them for so many reasons, right? Most often I think about graduation in its most simplistic terms—the actual graduation and moving on to work (or more education), but it’s so much more then that. These young adults have often moved away from home for the first time in their life, they have lived on their own, they have attended some really hard classes, they have shopped for groceries and cooked, they have done laundry (please tell me not for the first time), they have made friends and built relationships, they have advocated for themselves perhaps for the first time, and so much more. The child that goes off to college is not the child we celebrate at graduation! They are so much more.

So what I learned last night is that a college graduate is, unwittingly, an enormous risk-taker. Sure, they take on these risks because everyone else is taking on the same risks too, but isn’t that irrelevant? Isn’t that exactly how life works as we get older? People are taking the same risks we should be taking, BUT we aren’t all living on the same campus. That’s the only difference. Yet we stop taking risks. We are rarely as brave as we were when we went off to college. I know it’s a whole frontal lobe thing, but I want us all to see it. We were enormous risk-takers once. And to be clear—we didn’t take enormous risks, we, too, took a lot of little risks, all that were essentially reversible. I hope you are looking at graduates and yourself a little bit differently this morning!

Let’s GO! WE GOT THIS!
BETH