Graduation ritual (Anne)

You graduate from something, but more importantly, you graduate to something. You graduate to practice. To taking what we gave you and playing with it, applying it wherever you can make it fit, breaking it, making it your own. You graduate from learning to doing. From understanding to changing.

Tonight, we want you to look back and what will have been before you. We want you to take a moment to think about the steps that you will have taken in the coming days and weeks and months, and where you will have ended up with them.

In both scenarios:

Path one: you feel queasy about some of the stuff you learnt. inept. unskilled. it feels kinda mucky. you move on to stuff you are good at. it feels good to feel capable. problems come up. the concepts knock on your mind, wanting to help out, but you have ways of doing things that have worked for a long time, and they work again, more or less. I don't really know how this text goes.

Path two: you find words for what you don't get. you find sentences for your doubts and scepticism. you reach out. who do you reach out to? what do you ask? they take the time to listen. some of the stuff you bring up they see and have no answer to. you speak again, two weeks later. still no answers, but the conversations are good. one of the people in this call reaches out, asks if you want to practice. or is it you who reaches out? who do you want to practice with? what do you want to ask them to practice with you? can you imagine the sentence you might say? they say yes. you practice and while it is still hard in the beginning, it is also fun. it feels good to connect with this human on the other side of this screen while you stay at home. years later, you meet them in person. you think back to the conversations, to that one snippet you shared and felt shy about, raw and a bit uncomfortable. they tell you then that it changed their life — one thing they struggled with became easier, just a tiny bit, and they haven't forgotten that. you fight with your partner. or your mom. anger is what you feel. twenty minutes later, on your walk, you find the picture on your phone with the feeling words and questions to ask yourself. you have a hunch about the value that you care about and when you are back from your walk, you find words for it. they understand something about you they didn't before. the weekend turns out connected and kinda sweet. you'll find again, and you won't know what to do. but sometimes, some fights, you come in contact with yourself and help them come in contact with what you value. that feels good. there is a project you are working on and in one meeting you manage to resolve a quarrel between two colleagues. their goals conflict, but their values don't. you are proud that you managed to point your finger at that. when you talk with one of the people at the event you are hosting, you discover something they care about you never thought about. you adjust how you welcome guests to your events. they notice and thank you three weeks later.

Take a step back, out of that future. Take a breath. Make a step forward, into the future where you stick to what you knew before this course. In that one, what goes missing? What will you not explore, not discover, not experience? What are you giving away in your relationships, in your work, in your self-discovery? What relationships that spawned here whither? What changes that could have been will not be? Take a moment to sit with that. Map it out. Let it sink in. Trace back: what will be hard about using any of this? Where will you get stuck? What holds you back? What shoulds keep you from naming and exploring the coulds on the way? And who can help? And how will you ask them for help?

Take a step back. Take a breath. Feel your skin, the chair, the temperature of the room you are in. Where are you right now? Look around the room you are in. There is a screen. There is people in the screen. They are waving at you.

And then we ourselves ask people for help — in private message? out loud? in emails the next day?