Normally I hate graduations and have skipped them whenever I can
There's long been a sense for me that they're fake and, while wanting to be well-meaning, they offer empty platitudes with small slices of bland sandwiches after a flavourless ceremony.
Maybe that speaks more to my own experience, as it probably began when I spoke as Chair of the School Board at my graduation and then went on unemployment benefits for four years rather than finding a world of opportunity.
Then, four years after finally accessing the financial support to study, I refused to wear a gown to my uni graduation and found that lots of people told me that I looked better for dressing differently.
It was an experience that might have hardened my aloofness and desire to be distinct from whatever everyone else was doing, which honestly mightn't have worked out so well in the long run.
I've changed careers a handful of times and it feels like that restlessness has been speeding up.
If there's one thing that's kept a sense of regularity since I stopped owning a dog, it has been being a parent.
This role has provided so many opportunities to revisit those difficult memories of being a child and find a new perspective that's sympathetic toward my own parents.
Therapy would have been cheaper and now I wonder if my own children will begrudge me for moments of selfishness or recognise the struggle to keep sane as obligations multiply and come into conflict with our lives together?
Anyway, today I went to my child's graduation ceremony and came away with a very different experience.
My daughter wasn't the first of my kids to finish high school, so I didn't have the shock of wondering why her class was so small.
At our regional high school it seems more than half the class will leave at the end of Year 10 to find jobs, apprenticeships or maybe they move away for opportunities in a city.
The Principal spoke predictably about how this class of students arrived five years earlier as children and were now leaving as young adults.
Ha, I thought, what a world they’ve got to find their way through.
Then she recognised that something significant happened in Year Eight, when everyone had been forced to learn how to study online.
There was a worldwide pandemic that saw the stocks of Zoom rise and gave me a firsthand observation of how differently my children approached their studies.
My oldest child struggled without the face-to-face opportunities to be assured he understood the expectations of an assessment.
My youngest seemed to get everything finished within an hour and spent the rest of the day in Minecraft.
My daughter, a middle child, was often so quiet as to be unnoticed.
She would retreat to her bedroom and I began to recognise her resourcefulness, as she never asked for assistance and clearly had observed that Google had all the answers.
When I enquired about assessments she showed me how a group of friends negotiated in a messaging application to divide the workload.
I saw this chat group was named "Boomer remover" and callously admired the dark humour as the casualties began to rise.
Now at her graduation, I listened to people occasionally coughing around me and wondered if I was going to catch COVID again.
Many don’t acknowledge the pandemic continues.
My reflections were disrupted by movement on the stage as the speeches that blah-ed in the background came to lull.
A couple were moving with long hair that looked like something from a time before I had hair of my own.
A young man with a mullet, then a young woman took to the podium with flat long flowing centre-parted hair, that's the style of the day again it seems.
Young Mullet recounted how they'd been told they were the worst Year Seven in 25 years, while Centre-Part spoke about how they had been able to observe changes in their year advisor as he found love and got married.
There was a weird sense that something shifted in me, as I realised the kids had been watching as the world stopped and was restarted.
They had likely also wondered if anyone knew what they were doing while a defining moment in our lives entered every house and then was swept aside by the rush to resume regular life.
Often it seems a dissonance to hear people minimising the risk of lifelong debilitation with a phrase like "spicy cough" so their aspirations can fly again to holiday in unimaginative destinations.
And it occurred to me that this is the way of things, like seasons changing, inevitably cycling through changes that feel like gentle progress while really remaining on the spot like pedalling on an exercise bike.
My cynicism concluded that classes keep graduating and people keep standing behind podiums telling people there is something to look forward to.
Then the most unlikely thing happened, the graduating class danced out of the auditorium.
I don't know when choreographed dancing at graduations became a thing and I suspect I might have seen it at a previous ceremony and thought it was naff.
However, today I looked into 41 joyful faces and didn't see a single cynical outsider pretending to go through the moves.
It was remarkable that a group could agree on music, let alone the steps to go with it.
The graduation program listed names of students that I'd been hearing since my daughter joined kindergarten and, as I looked around, the parents' faces I'd known from attending assemblies all looked older.
That's one thing that's different from my schooling, I went to five different schools and my daughter has only known two.
I wondered if this little community in the Riverina had provided something more than being little.
We walked outside into the sunshine to find the students talking excitedly in small groups.
People posed for photos and I had the strangest sensation of excitement for the possibilities these young people have waiting for them.
So much is changing and there have been challenges, yet the kids have grown up and I realised that I had too.
My own relationship with schools is about to be approached from a new angle, as I prepare to enter classrooms as a teacher.
As I reflect on how much I've resented sitting through school assemblies and speeches for decades now, it comes as a shock to realise that I will have opportunities to be that blahing voice at the podium after I graduate.
I hope to have the same enthusiasm and excitement that I have seen on the faces of students.
Maybe I will know that mask-like smile that I see teachers wear during public events at schools.
Or perhaps I should recognise the times have changed and learn to dance?
Time really does move in circles, lapping seasons and ticking over years.
Each revolution brings a new perspective on the next.
I just need to keep learning new moves to stay relevant.
