The Leader Board

Write About the Seeds, Not the Watermelon

Graduation Speech to David Brearley High School's Class of 2023

Kyle C. Arlington, Superintendent of Schools

June 2023

Welcome Board Members, Parents, Families, Friends, Faculty, Staff, and all our guests who are here to celebrate the class of 2023! This is a very special night, and I am honored to share it with all of you. 

To begin, I stand here today, and all of us are able to join together today because we live in the greatest country in the world.  

A country that is built upon countless people who have served in the military to protect our freedoms. With this in mind, and so that we may, as a community, express our gratitude, I’d like to ask that the members of our graduating class who will serve in any branch of the US military — as well as those in our audience who have or currently serve — to stand now to be recognized.  Thank you for your service. 

Graduation marks a celebratory milestone. It's an occasion that most adults catalog as commemorative of a moment in time they remember fondly, with bittersweet nostalgia. Life is filled with these big moments that serve as markers of time. First jobs and first loves. The birth of a child or the passing of a grandparent.

These moments and the contexts in which they situate are likely well-defined spots of time that you can (or will) remember with vivid detail as you look back on them. I can still remember the smell of the bus as I walked onto it on my first day of high school. I can still recall holding my newborn daughter in one arm as I try to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night.

Something embodied in these moments allows them to shape who we are without us having to do a lot of work to keep them with us as we carry them around in our day-to-day existence. These moments become the fabric of our life stories that we author. They become more than moments. They become more than human. They become who we are.

But what happens between these big moments gets a bit hazy and unceremoniously forgotten. I want to make a case for increasing our collective sensitivity and awareness of these small moments. The moments that comprise our everyday life, outside of milestones and between important occasions, because these small moments matter. They, too, shape who we are.

Young kids learning to write in the elementary grades often author what teachers call “breakfast to bed stories.” The stories sound like this. “First I woke up, then I brushed my teeth, then I got dressed”, then…eventually….many pages later….they end with: “I went to bed.” Breakfast-to-bed stories aren’t exciting pieces to read. They’re filled with too many events young kids think are important but are really somewhat inconsequential in life's grand picture. 

As teachers, we encourage students to write about small moments. We tell them that the topic is too unwieldy when they want to write about Florida. We say don’t write about Florida or your trip to Disney; rather, write about the time you got sick on Space Mountain. We sway them away from writing about their most unusual school day of the year, it’s too big. We say write about the moment you went outside and the world was filled with a smokey orange haze from Canadian wildfires that made their way to the two square miles of Kenilworth. 

We say: Don’t write about the watermelon; write about the seed. 

Graduates, these seeds, these small moments are everywhere. I encourage you to take the time to notice them. Take the time to collect them. But it’s tricky because you don’t know if the moments are big or small until years later. It’s not until you look back at the course of your life, or periods of it that you have the wisdom and life experience to label life events as watermelons or seeds. 

But I promise you, these small moments may be the ones that have the greatest impact on who you are. Surely, you’ve had some already. A quiet compliment from a teacher might point you toward a career or field of study you haven’t considered. A quick conversation you struck up with a random classmate on the first day of ninth grade might lead to a lifelong friendship. 

We gloss over these small moments as we rush from one big milestone to the next. For those of you who will marry one day, your wedding will be a big moment, but it might be what comes before — a first kiss or a first “I love you” — that defines your lifelong relationship. 

And not all small moments are positive. The death of a loved one may define you one day, but keep your small moments with that person close to your heart. It might be a last conversation — that, of course, at the time that you didn’t realize was a final exchange, that haunts you and matters most.

Collecting these small moments entails a heightened sense of awareness of how we interact with each other. It calls for a certain way of being in the world that foregrounds sensitivity, kindness, alertness, and an acknowledgment that the seemingly small exchanges and events of our life might be the seeds that we plant that yield the richest harvest. 

Class of 2023, as you walk out of this gymnasium tonight, I encourage you to author the story of your life by writing about the seeds, not the watermelon. Don’t discard the seeds; collect them; I know over time, you will have one hell of a collection of small moments that will lead to a life of big impact.

Graduates, I wish you health, happiness, and success. Good luck, and God Bless.