The Scholar

Weekend Warriors will be canceled this week 
to pay tribute to my son, The Scholar. 

He just Graduated from High School 
and this is his speech! I am so proud of him!

Chandler Tipton

Graduation Speech

​There is a moment that I hope each of you have experienced at least once in your lives – Where you can remember each of those big "firsts" that paved the way for each experience that came after it.  You can remember when you were the only kid on the planet to have tried those awesome things called pancakes, and to jump that far off the park’s swing, (and to cry that loudly when you fell and scraped your knee).​I can remember all of these moments so well because I am still having them.  The only difference is that the pancakes and swing set have been replaced by sushi and cars.  High School introduced to us the appealing concept of reinvention, and this vast transition from child to adult is held largely within the confines of the classroom.  Each day, we see the people around us trying on new faces, forming new perspectives on a world that they are so rapidly gaining an understanding of.  And this lifestyle of constant change becomes normal to us.  The trends pass by, the friends come and go, and (for whatever reason) the pants get lower and tighter.​But if I've found one thing to be consistent, it's that the time we spend here allows us to find our extended family.  Initially, not one of our choosing.​But lucky for us, however, we get to sift through the masses and separate the distant cousins from our brothers and sisters (and perhaps a few crazy Aunts and Uncles).  But if you’re lucky enough, you find a couple of relationships that last you a lifetime.  And though that number may be few, they are the ones who help you (pardon the phrase) “become what you are to be”.

​When you look at it this way, this graduation seems like a final tribute to the exciting discoveries of our youth, and a promise to continue to look for more.  So, the big question remains - What comes next?  I'll tell you now, I really don't know.  I don't know exactly which of you I'm going to keep in touch with, I don't know which days I'll remember above others, and I sure as heck don't know what I want to be when I "grow up" - Can any of us?  But if I've learned anything in these past few years is that that's OK.  I don't have to know right now!

​This stage of life is ending, but life itself is not.  Let's think about this statistically:​Our generation is expected to live until about 77-80 years of age (if not older).  According to these stats, this means that we're not even a quarter of the way through our lives yet.  Cool, right?​What this means to me is that this chapter of our lives, (while pivotal and transitory), is still just a chapter.  It's OK if we leave here today weary and unsure.  We can be afraid of not knowing what's next, because the fun part is trying to figure it out; At this point, we're fooling ourselves if we think we have all the answers.​We can’t stop here.  I believe that if nothing else, my experience in this place was a test of endurance.  But this endurance would mean nothing if today represented the end of my search for higher and deeper truths.  We owe it to ourselves and everyone who got us here - Our friends, our family, and our teachers who made it possible for all of us to walk this stage today - to carry this momentum into our adult lives. I encourage each of you here before me today to step off this stage and continue without breaking stride, because today is no end, it’s not even a real beginning.  It’s just one big transition.​I'd like to close today with a passage written by one of my personal heroes - Scientist Carl Sagan.  Here, Sagan talks about an image of the Earth taken from the edge of our Galaxy, an image that had been the most distant shot of our planet to date:​"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.​Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.​Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us."
 
​Graduates, Friends, Families - It is indeed up to us.

​Congratulations, and good luck to you all.

From Baby...

 To Boy...

To Man...