Every year, the month of June represents the closing of one chapter in a person’s life and the start of another one. For younger boys and girls, that could mean either moving from one level of Little League baseball to the next, or for 12-year-olds, the conclusion of that segment of hardball with the pony leagues and its longer base paths and stronger competition on the horizon. June is also a favorite wedding month, where scores of single people trade a carefree solitary existence for a life shared with a potential soul mate that in most cases involves having children and battling life’s obstacles as a combined unit.
The mid-point of the year is also the time for graduations—elementary to secondary school and secondary school to high school. College graduations loom large with all their pomp, circumstance and commencement speeches. While this earning of the sheepskin can be a gateway to full-time employment, grad school and subsequent crushing student debt, it is the high school graduation that promises the greatest combination of optimism, fear and excitement. For many high school grads, they are leaving teen years buttressed by the comforting cocoon of familial support, boundaries imposed by others and co-existence with peers they’ve know for years. In exchange, they are oftentimes getting their first taste of independence and self-imposed parameters where life’s opportunities are wide open and for the taking, arguably more so than any other time they’ve experienced up to this point. It is a time, as the late philosopher Joseph Campbell once said when, “Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.” It’s a mindset that the Sewanhaka High School and Floral Park Memorial High School Classes of 2012 will undoubtedly embrace.
— DGdR
