Adversity

Hello fellow graduates, first I would like to say congratulations. It has been a long four years with many ups and downs. The obvious being this world wide pandemic that has brought a great deal of adversity. 

“Graduation” by uonottingham is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Adversity is something no one can go through life without facing. In a way adversity can be an amazing gift. Full of perseverance, toughness and an overall great learning experience. Of course adversity can be an awful thing. Pushing you to your lowest point, taking your drive for success and throwing it out the window. I don’t want to stand up here and preach to you about how to overcome one’s experience with adversity. I am in the same boat as you, young, starting on a new path in the real world and moving up in life, full of curiosity and excitement. 

These past four years have been a time to remember. But one thing I know we will remember, is school during the pandemic. The long boring hours of online classes and monotonous time spent on Zoom. The hilarious moments when we watched some of our older teachers  learn how to use Zoom. What I am trying to express is not wisdom or knowledge, I am not telling you how to face your own types of adversity. I am trying to say that you have got this. As the class of twenty twenty two we have already been dealt a huge dose of adversity and we have a head start on ways to cope and push through it in the future. We pushed through three years back to back to back. What else could we possibly prepare for. 

If you take nothing else away from these four years let it be your experience with adversity. The future is not a given, we do not know what our success will amount to, not yet at least, but we will be tough, we will persevere through  pain and suffering, we will work hard to accomplish our goals. 

If I could go back today and change anything about my high school experience, it would be my attitude when facing adversity. 

I would like to share a quote with you today, most of you may already know this quote but here it is. As Sylvester Stallone once said, “You , me or nobody, is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be able to take the hits and not pointin’ fingers sayin’ you ain’t where you wanna be because of him or her or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that.” This is a very famous quote but I feel it was important to use. It ties in with this class, with these people. You have faced adversity and will work hard, you are not cowards. 

Once again, congratulations on finishing high school, and good luck in the future.