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A Graduation Letter To All

My graduation congratulations are probably not the first you’ve heard this day/week/month.

Odds are, if you’re graduating from college, you’ve already walked across that stage. Odds are, if you’re graduating from high school, you’ve still got a very stressful week or two ahead of you before I can officially offer my congratulations for your completion of your mandated academia.

I hope you had/will have a wonderful ceremony. I hope all your family and loved ones surrounded you and you had a wonderful day, as you so deserve in return for all your long nights, early moments, and the moments of doubt where you were so very close to giving up. But it all came together in the end, and you graduated.

Denver Takes D1 Title West Graduation

You probably had a very prolific speaker at commencement. One with gusto and vocabulary and a couple really lame jokes that you’re still not sure why you laughed at. Did he or she speak for two minutes? Twenty is more like it. I’m sure it was very engaging. It probably stirred you, hit you in some previously un-spurred part of the heart and has mobilized you on to greatness… or you just sat there and realized you’re actually sitting at the last lecture they’ll ever mandate you sit through. I’m sure that teacher really does want you to challenge the world and make it better. I’m sure that politician who’s been telling the same story for ten years really means it when he says “don’t be afraid to fail” or some other cliché…

What’s to follow is some advice that I wish I had heard when I graduated.

This is not a speech, and it’s not a cliché. Some of it is specific, some abstract and broad, from the least successful person that’ll ever offer words of advice. Me. I didn’t get a job in my field, I haven’t changed the world, and I was filled with nothing but fear in my moments of failure. I’m no better than you are, I won’t pretend I ever have been, nor ever will be, and I won’t receive a dime for my advice. For those reasons and those reasons alone, I can declare my words completely and different than any speech offered by a goober in a colored moo-moo on commencement day.

Brian Witmer’s Graduation Advice

I’m presuming the song is called ‘graduation’, although I’m not positive and don’t have the care to google it. You know the one. Someone spends five bucks to be funny and plays it ten times in a row on the jukebox at the bar between the hours of 1-2am anytime in the first two weeks of May. No matter how many times he plays it, it gets funnier every time, and the drunk girls in the corner cry harder and harder every time and proceed to hug for the duration of the song. That song has six words that matter:

“As we go on, to whatever”

You have no clue where you’re going to be next month, this Winter, and definitely not this time next year. If you think you do, you’re wrong, and if you have some guaranteed lock down thing, I genuinely hope it falls through for you just so you can experience the pit in the bottom of your belly that tastes like failure and makes your head swirl with the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to do now.

I want you to find your rock bottom.

Maybe not right now, when you’re vulnerable and expect to be on the bottom, right after college and all. No, that would be too easy. Right out of college I had a job out in Denver, Colorado. Working a job in a field I loved, getting decent pay, and I was out in a different part of the country that I had never been to before.

Life was great.

Witmer’s Euro Vacation – BEST AHM Ever!

That summer ended, I was no longer employed, I totaled my car, and didn’t have an apartment to move in to, much less friends to live with, or employment to pay rent. I went home to New York and returned to living with my parents. I applied for some jobs half-heartedly, and I laid on the couch. A couple weeks later I got sick of laying on the couch, so I started washing dishes. I think I got six dollars an hour, under the table, to wash dishes. I was the only college educated guy in the kitchen, and I was in my hometown.

My buddy called me up one night. He called to ask how things were going. I told him how things were going. I was washing dishes for six bucks an hour in a restaurant in my own home town, where I was sleeping on my parents’ couch. He told me that wasn’t good enough. Two weeks later I was living in Park City, Utah. He got me a job working at a ski resort.

That same Spring I was in the Czech Republic, playing lacrosse and seeing something I had never really seen before, a different country. I was hooked. A year later I found myself living in Torino, Italy. That summer I found myself living in Australia. This Spring I found myself in Poland, Prague, and the United Kingdom.

I found the world to be something I wanted not only to see, but to experience.

I realized that if I made a couple dollars, and only a couple dollars, that I had enough dollars to keep doing whatever I wanted. It didn’t take sixty thousand dollars a year and some fancy benefits or a lease on some shiny new car to make me happy. Maybe that’s what makes you happy. If that’s what makes you happy, go do what makes you happy.

For me, it was the thrill of jumping on opportunities. Some were presented to me, some I had to chase down, and others I manufactured completely on my own. Some made more sense than others, some seemed like terrible ideas until the plane took off, at which point you sell yourself on the idea pretty quick because there’s no turning back from there.

So look down at your feet. I hope they won’t be in that same spot a week, month, year, or decade from now.

The next little bit of advice would be to find out exactly who you are, who you always have been, and let that poor bastard out of his cage. Your entire life so far, you’ve been pushed. You’ve been nudged towards something.

NCAA Men's Lacrosse 2013 - Army at UMass

Sometimes that’s worked out really well. You were pushed towards college. Your parents made you play soccer when you were a kid or try out playing an instrument in high school. Maybe you fell in love with one of those things. I fell in love with lacrosse. Being pushed towards things isn’t always bad, but you’ve just reached the point where nobody is ever going to push you again. You are finally free, twenty some-odd years into your tenure on this planet, to make your own decisions.

If you’ve always wanted to go somewhere, or do something, go there and do it. Buy a plane ticket right now. Put your money down on the table. That money in your account can either go towards paying a bill or it can give you the time of your life. That bill will get paid somehow, they always do. Figure out where you want to wake up and what you want to see when you look out your window.

If it’s in an apartment you can’t afford in a neighborhood full of strangers, go for it. For me, it was waking up in the bed of my yellow 1981 Chevy pickup. I lived in that thing and every morning I woke up to something different. Sometimes it was terrifying. Sometimes it was right in time to catch the sun rise over a mountain that I didn’t know the name of, as it reflected off a lake whose name also escaped me.

montana

One extremely simple and direct tip towards identifying the soul that is associated to the face in the mirror would be to put down the sauce. I drink beer, and I drink other stuff too. I’m drunk sometimes, but the majority of my days and nights are now spent with clear eyes. In addition to the whole clarity of mind thing, it’s also a budgetary concern.

If you spend one hundred bucks a week, which isn’t hard whatsoever if you think about it, that would come out to four hundred per month, and my calculator tells me that’s $4,800 a year. You know what else you can do with five grand a year? Pretty much anything. Having a beer or four to celebrate something or to wind down after a particularly stressful day is totally fine, but if it’s a three or four night a week thing for you, and it’s every week, try putting down the drink for a few weeks. It’s not surprising that it is in fact more difficult to figure out who the hell you are when you can’t remember the name of the face in the mirror.

Your body will thank you. Your wallet will let you do things infinitely cooler than sitting at a bar full of strangers you don’t care about/don’t care about you. Every single relationship in your life will improve. Try it. If you can’t do it, you have a problem. If you can, and you choose to drink anyways, it is in fact a free country and I implore you to do as you please.

This whole “figuring out who you are” thing takes time. It takes hardship, and it takes a couple distinct moments where you need to make a decision. Left or right, yes or no, do or die. Whatever the choice is, you chose it, and you had the conviction to do so.

The last thing I would suggest would be to give. Maybe you won’t always have money to give. I’m sure you’ve understood the value of twenty bucks at some point during your college days, when you had to stretch Andrew Jackson for a week or maybe even more.

If you never got to experience the feeling of being broke, always phoning up Mommy or Daddy for a refill, I do feel sorry for you. Sure, it might’ve been nice to have more than rice and canned tuna covered in hot sauce for weeks on end, but I felt a feeling I had never felt before, and that was that I had insufficient funds, and that I was hungry.

I was still attending a university, with a roof over my head and parents who likely would’ve given me money if I were to ask, so let’s keep this in perspective here. While my situation was far from destitute, I did finally understand the value of a dollar, and I found an appreciation for a full belly that I’m not sure I had before college.

In the years after college, you’ll be tempted to hoard your money. Collect every dollar and forget everyone else, let them work for theirs. You’ll get wide eyes for the things you’ll be able to afford with your new found wealth, but let’s not pretend like you got here without a village of people investing their time and money into your future.

You won’t always have money to give. Even if you do have money, and you don’t want to give money, that’s fine as well. It’s selfish, but it’s fine. Give your time. My background is in sport and coaching, so I’ll use my background for an example because… well… this is my point of view I’m coming from. I’ve coached on three continents in seven countries. I’ve coached four and five year olds, I’ve coached thirty-five-year-old men. I’ve coached boys, I’ve coached girls. With the exception of some travel money from my Italian guys, and a couple bucks from a youth team out in Utah, I have made ZERO DOLLARS coaching.

I don’t have a great deal of money. What I have is my time. If the time I can give is able to truly help someone experience happiness in even the slightest sense of the word, then who am I to sit home and wastefully watch television?

The time you have, and the knowledge and understanding you can offer someone, might seem trivial and insignificant, but trust me, you can legitimately change someone’s life.

Go out and see the world. Roll with the punches when, not if, your plans fall through. Jump on opportunities. Find out exactly who you are. Give back.

This is my advice for you. There are a thousand little tips and tricks I can offer up, but if I had to narrow it down to a couple, this is what I’ve got for you.

I’ve said “I hope” an approximate 49 times in my authorship of this little piece. That’s because that’s all I have for you in the end. Endless and limitless hope. Everyone is all excited for the new batch of rats, chomping at the bit to join the race to nowhere. I’m excited for you, the individual. Turn some heads, show the world what you’re really made of. Show the world how beautiful life can be.

It’s your time. To use, or to waste.

It’s your world. To love, or to fear.