A Graduation for Us All
It's Back-to-School Time! Celebrate YOUR commencement with this new video : )
Good People!
I just returned home from my “I’m Still Alive” European tour with Satya, and this week I also return to work, preparing for another school year at Quest Forward Academy in Santa Rosa — a big milestone for me, having spent most of the last school year on medical leave recovering from some major health challenges.
I’m also celebrating my joyful transition into a new role at school as coordinator of the “Pathways” program, supporting career exploration, building professional foundations, and providing life-path counseling for our student community.
If you caught my last post, you saw that I just celebrated my 37th birthday (while on an overnight train in northern Finland, no less)! Over the next few weeks, as I settle back into life at home, I’ll be integrating my experience and sharing stories and media from the road (to augment the brief photo chronicles I’ve already shared on Instagram and Facebook).
For now, though — as I pivot somewhat abruptly to Back-to-School Mode — I wanted to take the opportunity to share a video of a very special occasion that took place earlier this summer.
In early June, before this mega adventure overseas, I had the honor of hosting the graduation ceremony of QFA’s Class of 2022 — the same amazing group of young people who started off as freshmen the same year that I began teaching at the academy.
I taught them Social Science for three years. It would have been four years, had I not been indisposed dealing with cancer this last year. But as I gradually returned to work in the last weeks of the spring semester, I had the perk of being able to spend a great deal of time with these students, including producing their commencement activities and delivering the keynote speech at their graduation ceremony.
I humbly invite you to enjoy a slightly abridged version of that speech here.
I’ve had the honor of offering commencement speeches at a number of graduations over the years, including the last three at QFA. The first of these was part of a virtual graduation ceremony at the hight of the Covid-19 pandemic. I filmed it on my back porch, and its theme had everything to do with emerging as warriors in a world on fire.
Many of you already viewed the video of the keynote speech I gave for my students last summer, just days before my cancer recurrence was diagnosed.
I delivered that speech in some of the worst physical pain I’ve ever felt, with no idea what a tumultuous summer awaited me. The theme of that speech, fittingly, was finding our wings by bravely jumping into the unknown.
This year, I rhapsodized on the mythological significance of initiation rites like graduation, and invited the graduates (and the wider tribe of cosmic graduates that includes us all) to accept the sacred challenge of being (in the words of some of my mentors) “guardians of our own joy."
I also gave one “underground commencement speech” back in 2015 to honor the graduates I bonded with during my first year teaching high school in Kelseyville, before the Valley Fire displaced my family from our home in Lake County. (Fun fact: I recorded that original commencement speech in Central Park while on my way to Washington DC, where about a week later I would decide to run for United States House of Representatives.)
I love offering these benedictions. I enjoy public speaking — and there is some added specialness in getting to address people (both the graduates themselves, and the families who raised them) at such a powerful moment in their personal history. The student walks across the stage, and suddenly, in many ways, they are seen by the tribe as an adult member of society.
The video of this Class of 2022 commencement speech just became available to me a few days before my departure with Satya on our big summer trip, and I was only able to roughly edit and publish it on the eve of my big July CT scan (the results of which I shared in my last post).
Inevitably, whenever I give graduation speeches like those shared here, I find in retrospect that I was speaking to myself as much as to the graduates. And chances are, I was speaking to you as well.
Now, as so many of us prepare for a new school year, I wanted to take a quick moment to highlight and honor this experience and share my speech with anyone who might be interested.
Having known this group of graduates since they started high school, this ceremony was particularly special to me. But when I think about graduation more broadly — this idea of moving on from one phase of life (and the lifelong project of education) to another — perhaps this year’s commencement can be something in which we all symbolically share.
It is never too late to pause and reflect on where we’ve been before advancing to the next level of our journey. We have all experienced trials and victories (and challenging, lesson-rich setbacks) that merit acknowledgement and celebration.
From what might you be graduating?
What new adventures are commencing for you?
In my case, you may already know the answer. It is no secret at this point that this last year-plus was incredibly difficult for me. Even the several years leading up to my dance with cancer — though filled with sweet moments with Satya, a few fleeting but powerful attempts at romantic relationships, and the soul-satisfying work of teaching, community organizing and running for office — were filled with deep pain, struggle and stress.
Despite my soul-deep desire and long-conscious intention to remember, I have done more than my share of forgetting, and it is something I am decidedly done with. I am graduating from unconscious living and playing small. I am commencing my life of authenticity, creative expression, sharing my truth, and radiating bravely the love and light that I am.
My last scan may have shown a technical 0.1 centimeter of further reduction in the size of one of my lymph nodes needed in order for the medical establishment to declare my full remission, but I feel like I have “graduated” from my cancer year and come full-circle on that journey, returning from the depths of the underworld with new consciousness and copious treasure to share.
As I commence this new life of wellbeing, joyful service, brave contribution, presence in the moment, and compassionate kinship with all life, I invite my community to join me in the continued spiral onward and upward.
As the chambered nautilus grows its shell each year, constructing a new and larger home from the minerals gathered during its undersea adventure — building “more stately mansions,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it — may we all, thus, continue our unique evolution into our best selves.
With enduring gratitude and appreciation, I remain,
Your servant,
Nils
