Dear graduates, teachers, classmates, and parents—good morning:

I’m Xingyao Wu from Grade 12, Class 1.

I’m going to start off with something cliche, so please bear with me.

At an occasion like this, it seems fitting to talk about growth. From childhood to adolescence, and now into early adulthood, we grow— in years, in responsibility, in identity, and in the way we interact with other human beings. We sense tinglings of change like we are on the edge of something new. Something exciting, confusing, and nonetheless real.

As a 12-year-old, my strategy for going about life was simply not to think about it. Just don’t think. But even then, I knew not having to think is, in fact, a privilege—because it usually meant that someone else was doing the thinking for me. My parents planned my schedules, so I didn’t have to. They drove my brother and me to school, made meals, managed schoolwork, and thought about our future—tasks large and small that entail energy, coordination, patience, and love. And being 12, I only had a rough idea of what really took place behind the scenes.

When we choose not to think, our life becomes someone else’s project. But responsible project managers (responsible parents), guide us to take on more responsibility.

At some point in middle or high school, the world no longer looked the way you once imagined. You no longer looked the way you once imagined either. Maybe we know that we crave recognition more than we’d ever like to admit, even to ourselves. Maybe we’ve found that we really can’t pull ourselves through just one book. Maybe we know, that when we walk into the cafeteria every day, we’re secretly terrified of having lunch alone, to be by ourselves when everyone else moves in crowds.

So what is growth?

I think it is to take responsibility, to form and trust your own judgment. This means we’ll have to understand ourselves better, and to straighten out the beliefs we hold as absolute truths.

New things are wonderful, like lighting the unknown corners of our world. But not all discoveries are uplifting. I was struck that the stories I once took to heart have started to lose their aura. That the people I took to be wise carried fear, which they refused to name. That the funny, spirited souls I knew were awash with grief. And those we once admired—perhaps they, too—as Susan Neiman writes (in Why Grow Up?):

“[those we once admired] ...know less than we thought, offer fewer solutions than we hoped. Even if they don’t lie to us, they won’t tell us everything. They try to protect us in the wrong ways, and so they can’t truly protect us the right way. Their habits, shaped by another time, may make us uncomfortable. They criticize what they don’t understand, and fall behind as the world changes.”

Between accepting everything we are told, and rejecting it all, there’s a middle path——the quiet, deliberate work of thinking for yourself.

If ideals show us the world as it should be, and experience reveals the world as it is, then growth is learning to live with the space between them. It means not giving up on ideals without turning a blind eye to reality. It means shaping your own sense of judgment—with the patience and humility to let that judgment grow.

This is the kind of growth that philosophers of the Enlightenment once wrote about—the kind that asks not for certainty, but for courage

To grow is:

to live with uncertainty—and to keep moving forward anyway.

For a world of certainty was never an option, but the choice to be courageous, that choice is wide open.

Growth is difficult to define, harder to grasp, and intolerable in a lengthy speech. It asks us to leave what’s familiar, to speak in new languages, and to find our place in unfamiliar circles. To grow, we must become fluent not only in new cultures but also familiar with who we are as people. That is no small task.

As the philosopher Neurath explains, like sailors who navigate the open waters, we must rebuild our vessel at sea, with no option of docking on solid shores. Plank by plank, we repair what we have as we go. 

So let us carry this understanding of growth—with all its humility, courage, and strength—as we venture into what lies ahead. 

Thank you.