[0:00]2017 Val Victorian. Ryan will give his.
[0:18]Good evening ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, teachers, students, Andrew Huffmire, and all of you guys, the class of 2017. It's truly an honor to be speaking to you all on this very, very special and exciting day. You know, four short years ago, when we first entered the doors of Rice High School, we didn't know what we were in for. We didn't know what a Raider was. We didn't go on any raids. We didn't even know that Mrs. Shering actually had a real name besides iPad lady. We didn't know any of the coaches. Like seriously, who is Coach Spoon and why is he named after an eating utensil? Someone tell me. We didn't know that Mrs. Besch was obsessed with The Beatles, and we definitely didn't know that Coach Schendel was actually a super-villain whose powers include extreme strength and algebraic expressions. Although we didn't know any of these things, we learned them together with time. And now we're here in the final chapters of our high school journey. Alright, now let's get to the inspirational, life lesson, motivational mumbo jumbo. I'm going to start with a story. And one of my all-time favorite stories begins with a man. Now one day, this man is walking down a path and he finds an egg, an eagle's egg. He takes the egg and he places it into the nest of a backyard hen. Pretty soon, the eagle hatches with the chicks and grows up with them. Now all his life, this eagle did what the chickens did. He would poke around in the dirt for worms and insects to eat. He would fly a few feet in the air like chickens do. He would cluck around. As time passed, that eagle, he grew very, very old. And one day, he saw something above him. This thing, it glided gracefully and majestically through the clouds. "What's that?" the eagle asked. Whoops. "Oh, that? That's an eagle," one chicken responds. "He is the king of all birds, the master of the skies. But we, we're just chickens and we belong to the ground. Don't worry about him, because you will never be that. And that eagle lived and died a chicken because that is what he thought he was. You see, when we were kids, we dared to live a life of impracticality. We would be astronauts and doctors and professional athletes, and we would change the world and expect nothing less of ourselves. But over time, in one way or another, we become victims to complacency and resign ourselves to mediocrity. Because what happens, and it's a very scary thing what happens, is you start limiting yourself without even knowing it. Without even taking a step back and questioning whether or not you're capable of more, or whether or not you deserve more, you begin to limit yourself. And it's not our fault. It's the programming of society. They tell you that you should dream big, but not too big. They tell you that you should work hard and get a safe job, not necessarily a job that you love. They tell you to spend the best years of your life watching television in a subdivision. They tell you that you can't make it to the pros, you can't build a great company, you can't build the house of your dreams, you can't make a real difference, you can't change the world. You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't. And what happens, if I listen to this message, and if I allow this message to influence me, and it's terrifying, is one day, I'm afraid I'll wake up, and I'll be 20 years old, or 35 years old, or 55 years old, or 85 years old, and I will have this realization that I allowed this thinking, this "mass thinking" to influence me, that I allowed it to waste precious time. That, like a thief in the night, I allowed it to steal life from me. That I allowed it to siphon my happiness, and potential and imagination. Never let them take those things from you. Because if they do, all we become is a flickering light. A shadow of withering desire. An aimless creature stumbling over liberty in search of the illusion of fulfillment, shackled by conformity disguised as hope. My fellow classmates, as we leave this stadium tonight and journey on into the rest of our lives, we will only ever have two choices: to merely exist as the chicken we are not, or to live as the eagle we are. Thank you, everyone.
