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For Ashlyn Bird, one of the commencement speakers at Williamsport High School, encouraging her classmates to imagine what senior year would have been like if COVID-19 had not happened was one way of helping everyone remember what was lost, while preparing to move on.
"Now, let us pretend. Let us all imagine our senior year the way we wanted it to be. Close your eyes if you want, let this moment live, let's pretend the memory making never ended," she entreated her fellow graduates.
"Although our senior year may have ended much differently than we ever expected, we cannot waste our time waiting for this storm to pass…We must embrace high school, we must bask in the innocence, the community and the feelings we have come to cherish. Here and now, we must move on," Bird said.
Both Bird and fellow speaker Emily Smith quoted Vivian Greene's words, "Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain," referring to the pandemic and the subsequent shutdown of schools.
"For most seniors, there is a natural progression to winding down formal education," Smith said, detailing all the benchmark events in a high school student's career.
"However, not much about our senior year has been normal," Smith said. "Instead of this progression that classes before us have been gifted, we have been gifted with regret. Regret that we could have done things differently…The past few months have felt like a storm and every one of these regrets felt like rain coming down and harder."
Smith remarked that rain isn't always a bad thing and that it promotes growth.
"Our class has become experts at dancing in the rain," Smith said.
"We were born into a time where our entire country was in need of healing, and we are concluding our childhood in the eye of a pandemic…Our generation has grown up through a storm, so we won't run when a little more rain comes our way," Smith said.
Lily Douglass, senior class president, spoke of the disruption of senior year from a more positive perspective.
"Most classes can say that high school alone has taught them something valuable, but I think our class is unique in that the shortage of high school during our senior year has taught some of us more than we could have ever learned just sitting at a desk," Douglass said.
"We can now handle situations that we never would have imagined. We can now make the most of every situation that comes our way. We can now go and change the world by inspiring others," Douglass said.
Douglass offered scripture as inspiration for her classmates. "Perhaps this is the moment for when you have been created," she quoted.
"Every moment of our lives led us to this, and every single moment after will change us," Douglass added.
Douglass also told the Williamsport High School Class of 2020 to remember, "We had the best senior skip day that will never be topped."