Good morning President Plough, honored guests, faculty, parents, family, and last, but certainly not least, good morning to the members of the Class of 2007:

“Remember tonight…for it is the beginning of always.” Well, thus spoke Dante, and rightly so. We must remember today, for it truly is the beginning of always. This is not to discount or undervalue the past two decades of our lives, or the past four years here at Assumption, but rather to celebrate the mysteries that lie ahead. One professor remarked on the last day of classes, quoting former French professor at Assumption Father Guissard, “Your classes have ended; your studies are beginning.”

Of course, he was suggesting that while indeed we accomplished much while at Assumption, the road ahead brings with it uncertainties that will provide a new brand of education, one founded in the so-called “real world.”
“Always” is filled with variables, and to some extent, that makes some of us uncomfortable. It is unsettling to embark into the world with no plan.
Or, maybe that is just me. But I am sure that I’m not alone; that there are others who are also unsure at this point, uncertain of what their future holds.

It seems we try to make “always” out to be a definite place; a period in life where everything is calculated and known. But, where is the fun in that?
When we try to plan out our lives at this age, we set ourselves up for disappointment. After all, no matter how well we plan, surprises surely await us. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.”

Most of us moved into the dormitories at Assumption College on August 30, 2003, unloading the cars packed too high with too much stuff that we never ended up using; with food that our roommates ate; with your favorite shirt that mysteriously went missing after a few weeks.
Seriously though, whoever took my shirt, I want it back. Well, anyway, the day was exceptionally hot. I remember my room well: Salisbury 222.

I climbed to the top of the stairs, loaded down with duffel bags and cardboard moving boxes, scanning each door in the hallway for my room. My pod was already buzzing with new faces. I found my room, and the door was ajar, so I assumed that my roommates must already be there.

I walked in to find my future roommate sitting in a leather desk chair, playing videogames—in his underwear. I dropped my stuff on one of the vacant beds, and proceeded to introduce myself, thinking it wise to make the best out of the situation.
When he saw me, he jumped up to introduce himself and offer his help in bringing up my things. I felt relieved; he seemed nice. So he got dressed, and we went downstairs to meet up with my parents. We both took a box from the backseat of my car, and went up the one flight of stairs to our room.

He set his one box down on my bed, wiped his forehead, and said, “It’s way too hot out there. You’re gonna’ have to get the rest yourself.” He dropped back into his desk chair, picked up the video game controller, and I don’t think he moved from that position the rest of the first semester of college. Needless to say, he did not last long here at Assumption.

Regardless of this “interesting” experience, one which I am sure is not all that foreign to most of us here, we all survived freshman year. We faced struggles adapting as we tried to establish our identity in a new environment, as we faced newfound freedoms and lifestyles, yet we all pulled through and quickly set to work on building this college community.
Note that I say we “built” the community. The community at Assumption is not something that we integrated ourselves into, an already established place that awaited our arrival; instead, we built this community. In that sense, community is a verb. We do not fit into it, but rather we fit it to reflect us.

We have spent the last four years establishing a community, and this is why we feel such pain in leaving it behind. However, we must remember that nothing is permanent.

Yet, while nothing is guaranteed permanent, we can find stable things amongst the shifting of the world. One of these is community. When we build communities, we establish not simply a literal gathering of people, crammed into small—much too small—dorm rooms, but relationships and memories that are capable of withstanding change.

It is such stable things that produce an ordered world. Despite the fact that we will leave Assumption College this afternoon, and move into the world as fragments of the community that we built, we will always be able to reassemble these pieces as though a puzzle. Even when one of our puzzle pieces gets lost amongst the couch cushions of the world, the puzzle piece will always fit when at last found.

So just remember that wherever life takes you all, you have something stable to fall back upon—a support system—in the community that we built here at Assumption.

While it seems as though we leave the comfort of our community for the confusion of the world at large, we simply leave the college to go out and establish another community outside of Assumption.

This building of community is essential, as it allows us to find ways to exist as individuals in the world. After all, if there is one thing I learned in college, and fittingly it came during this last semester, a capstone of sorts, it is to stop fitting into the mold; to stop being what we are told to be, and to stop meaning what we are told to mean.

It seems we spend too much time trying to aspire after the obligations fed to us, trying to reach the goals that we feel we should have. We panic when we have not found a job yet, or at least the perfect job; we feel guilty in wanting to take a year off before applying to graduate programs, or in still being unsure of what we want to do for a career.

We worry about not having direction. Yet, maybe this is not such a problem; maybe this is the best that we can do: to disregard permanence, and move with freedom and flexibility.
Samuel Beckett one wrote in his “From an Abandoned Work,” “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.” On his way where, he does not know, and he seems content; perhaps we should take a page from his book. Perhaps we must realize that we don’t need to move in specific directions—we simply must move.

Do not worry about finding the perfect job, after all, statistics show that most of us will change jobs several times over our lives, not settling until we are middle aged. We must then be skeptical of trying to fit a mold, of trying to be perfect and complete at such a young, and exciting, time in our lives.

As the narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club discovers, he is too perfect, too complete. What an odd thought. Isn’t that in some sense what we seek: to be complete, to be perfect? And maybe, just maybe, that is our main problem. The narrator says, “At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

It sounds ridiculous. This is the exact opposite of what we all seek, right? Yet, he does not mean to say that we should literally destroy the self, but that we need to constantly remind ourselves what life means; we need to repeatedly break the boundaries of normality, of stale contentment, and push ourselves to be the best that we can; to make life count by embracing the diverse possibilities of life, and recognizing that we have a long way to go, and that is alright.

Tyler Durden says in Fight Club that sometimes “the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a level. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.” This is frightening, but it is what happens to those who become so focused on goals that come without any real introspection; it happens to those who worry so much about being complete that they fear being even momentarily “incomplete.”

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being asked what I plan to do when I graduate. What will I do? The question should really be: what won’t you do? After all, the road ahead has infinite opportunities, opportunities that await us all, and even if we have not yet set our sights on a specific goal—we should be ok with that.

In fact, instead of following the road of convention, the road where we simply do what is expected of us, maybe we need a bit of madness.

Aristotle, yes Aristotle, I know that many of you never want to hear that name again, but he has a good message: he writes, “No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.” While Aristotle is certainly “traditional,” and therefore an odd person to quote when advocating breaking convention, we have been taught another important lesson about tradition: that the future is, and always will be, progressive and alive; it will shift in unpredictable ways.

Our studies here have taught us to value tradition, but also to engage with an open future, a future that is therefore in many ways a bit mad. Yet this madness does not imply insanity. That’s not what I am trying to tell you— I mean madness in the sense of being unconventional, of embracing creativity and flexibility; it means embracing the energy of change!

We seem to associate madness only with insanity, but I think, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze says, “madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be a breakthrough.” It may lead us to think differently about the world, to experience all that we never saw before. Thus, madness is not necessarily a bad thing; it isn’t a state where failure awaits us, but maybe, it is a state that brings incredible successes.

Finnish writer Henrik Tikkanen once said, “Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.” Given the fact that we all sit here today, a day where we celebrate our successes and intelligence, we could all afford to be a bit “mad” sometimes.

Perhaps the best example of nonconformity is Jesus. Jesus was unconventional when he practiced His ministry. We are told to form ourselves in the image of Christ—of course, as the school motto states: “Until Christ Be Formed in You”—yet, if we are to do so, like Christ, we must take risks.

We must not worry about failure, about not fitting into the delicate order provided for us. We have proven ourselves intellectually, evident in the fact that we are all sitting here today, and now we have the freedom to choose for ourselves. As Jack Kerouac writes in his On the Road,

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…

He speaks of those who value life so much that they seem almost, as he says, “mad”; they seem intoxicated with the potent love for life. Maybe this individualism, this madness, is the watermark of true success. So do not fear the unconventional, but rather, embrace it as we leave Assumption College freethinking, independent citizens of the world.

While we prepare to become citizens of the world, remember that we are always citizens of Assumption College. While indeed I encourage you to explore the possibilities of life, remember the lessons learned here at this institution.

Let them guide you; let them serve as the torch that lights your untrodden path. We may not all know where we’re going at this point, but we can always remember where we have been.

As the poet Dante writes in his Inferno, “Consider well the seed that gave you birth: / you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”

If this is truly what we were created to do, then we made the right choice; it was no accident of circumstance that we all ended up here at Assumption College.

By seeking to shape students with critical thinking skills, students with a solid work ethic, and a compassionate outlook on the world, the school has prepared us to succeed not only in this created educational community, but ultimately, to succeed in the global community.

So let us go out and make this school proud, make ourselves proud, by proving that we indeed rose to the challenges and that we will continue to do so in the future.

Thus, the adventure is not over, but just beginning. In that sense, Dante is correct: we must “remember today…for it is the beginning of always.”