To my fellow graduates, their families, teachers, and friends:

I am standing before you today, like so many others, a proud member of Midland High School's graduating class of 2010. We never thought this day would come.

When I learned that I was to deliver this speech to all of you, my stomach did so many somersaults it almost made it to the Olympics. And I'm a (former) gymnast, so I do know what I'm talking about there. What do people want to hear? What do I know that could possibly be of any use to my fellow seniors, should I impart it unto them?

We came here four years ago with the same mindset that we left the eighth grade yet - we are young and invincible and nothing is finite. If a grenade falls on your head Wiley coyote-style, you can peel yourself up off the ground and keep walking like nothing has happened.

We leave here today with the knowledge that nothing is infinite. Rather the opposite - things are finite to within such a small amount of time that in a split second, your life can change drastically, and maybe even forever. I haven't been around for long enough to know about the forever part, but I'll get back to you in 80 years or so.

I won't tell you that that's why you should live your life to the fullest, because you've heard that so many times it probably makes you nauseous. I will tell you that because so much is finite, and because everything can change in a second, that our greatest glory comes not from never falling, but from rising each time we fall.

If I had the privileged of time travel, there are things in my past, as in everybody's, that I would love the opportunity to undo, or to have undone unto me. I would change the past, but I would not change the person I have become. But are they really separate entities? Or are they so critically connected that in changing one split second of the past, the future would change forever?

I've pondered this often this year, and this is what I've come up with: we weave a tangled web, and connections are so intricate and complex that maybe they shouldn't be messed with. If changing the past means also changing the future, possibly even dramatically, then maybe that's the reason I, like all of you (I'm guessing) don't have the option of time travel. And maybe, for ethical reasons, we never should. Because maybe happily ever after isn't really something we should focus on as much as happy right now. Which, today, I believe we all are.

Congratulations everyone.


>That's all I have so far. I really like the part about the happy ending - maybe someday I should be so lucky as to get one of my own. Cheers.