Graduation or Commencement?
Friend,
It’s May, so your social media is filled with pictures of people in robes and hats for graduation.
Or is it commencement?
I get fascinated by words, and I’m fascinated at how we use two words that seem to mean different things.
Graduation feels like the ending. It’s over.
Commencement feels like the beginning. Something has just started or commenced.
But yet, we use these two words interchangeably. Let’s go down a little word etymology!
Graduation comes from the Latin word gradus, which means step (think of grade as in the grade of an incline). Thus a graduation ensures the completion of a step in your journey.
Commencement comes from the French word comencier, which means to begin. Particularly, it came to be used at a graduation ceremony because this was when individuals would “begin to be” high school graduates, bachelors, masters, or doctors.
I love that we have two words that mean vastly different things: completion and beginning to signify these momentous occasions because we need both. Whether you are graduating or just experiencing a transition, it’s important to remember to look back and look ahead.
If we look back and don’t look ahead, we can be caught up in a circle of grief that only longs for a world that no longer exists.
If we look ahead and don’t look back, we can miss opportunities for gratitude and insights that only the past can provide.
The key to experiencing this transition (and the many, many transitions we will have) is to pause and look around. It’s to be grateful and be hopeful. It’s to hold these two things not as opposites, but as a tension that strengthens you.
There is this 90s band called Semisonic (great 90s band name) that had a hit song called “Closing Time.” (It’s a song that appears to be about the closing of a bar, but he wrote it symbolically about childbirth.) In the song, there’s this line that has stayed with me,
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Commencement/Graduation.
Love,
Aaron