By name No. 437, I was in trouble.
Not actual trouble. Graduation ceremony trouble.
The kind where your hands hurt from clapping, your smile has become permanently affixed to your face, and you find yourself wondering whether the student currently crossing the stage is somewhere in the M’s or whether time itself has simply stopped moving.
Twenty-one years in public education prepares a person for many things. Among them is the ability to sit through the reading of more than 600 names in alphabetical order while remaining outwardly pleasant and only moderately detached from reality.
Usually, I have a job to do at graduation ceremonies, which helps. Dying inside is generally discouraged when you are responsible for teenagers.
What has always held my attention, though, are the speeches.
Not necessarily the words.
The room.
The people.
The things happening around the words.
One student approached the podium clutching note cards with both hands. Another took a deep breath and looked briefly terrified before finding a rhythm. A third seemed completely at ease, as though speaking to several thousand people was no different than ordering coffee.
The speeches themselves were thoughtful. The students spoke about uncertainty, growth, purpose and finding their own path forward.
And while they were speaking, the rest of us behaved exactly like human beings.
A collective groan rippled through the crowd when one speech turned out to be longer than expected.
Parents shifted in their seats.
Teachers stretched their backs.
District officials glanced down at their phones.
At one point I noticed several adults seated behind the speakers quietly checking messages while pretending not to be checking messages. They would look down, scroll, then quickly look back up with an expression suggesting they had been hanging on every word.
I recognized the maneuver because I have perfected it myself.
Then, midway through the ceremony, a giant inflatable beach ball appeared out of nowhere.
Nobody seemed to know where it came from.
One moment it did not exist.
The next it was floating above the graduates, bouncing from hand to hand as students volleyed it across the crowd.
Its timing was impeccable.
A district official had just approached the podium to deliver remarks. Five minutes earlier, I had watched the same official glance down at a phone during a student’s speech. Not rudely. Not dramatically. Just in the quiet, practiced way many of us do when we think nobody is paying attention.
Now nobody was paying attention.
Not to the official, anyway.
The beach ball drifted lazily over rows of blue caps and gowns. Heads tilted upward. Fingers pointed. Students laughed. Parents smiled. Even a few adults seated near me appeared momentarily invested in its journey.
For about 15 glorious seconds, the entire graduating class became united in a single mission.
Keep the beach ball alive.
It was, without question, the most audience engagement of the morning.
An administrator moved toward it immediately.
When the ball drifted within reach, he snatched it from the air, produced a key from his pocket, and punctured it with remarkable efficiency.
The beach ball collapsed.
The students groaned.
The official continued speaking.
The administrator walked away carrying the deflated remains like a man who had successfully completed a very specific assignment.
Honestly, it was perfect.
A roomful of people being reminded to stay focused while collectively failing to stay focused.
A speech about the future interrupted by a beach ball.
A generation accused of having short attention spans watching adults sneak looks at their phones.
If there was a lesson in that moment, I am not entirely sure who it was intended for.
As the ceremony continued, I found myself paying closer attention to the students than the speeches.
Several openly admitted they did not have everything figured out.
More than one acknowledged uncertainty.
There was less confidence than I remember hearing from graduates 20 years ago and, oddly enough, more wisdom.
Nobody seemed interested in pretending they had all the answers.
They talked about relationships. About mistakes. About finding work they cared about. About people who had helped them along the way.
They talked less about arriving than becoming.
Which feels like a healthier way to enter adulthood anyway.
Watching them cross the stage, I found myself noticing how nervous many of them still looked.
One student practically sprinted across after receiving a diploma.
Another stopped for a photograph and immediately appeared to forget where to go next.
A young man who had spent four years cultivating an image of complete indifference spotted his family in the crowd and broke into a grin so enormous it ruined the whole act.
It was wonderful.
We spend a lot of time in communities like ours talking about outcomes.
College admissions.
Athletic scholarships.
Career paths.
Achievements.
Success.
Those things matter.
But sitting there somewhere between name No. 437 and name No. 612, I found myself wondering if we occasionally focus on the wrong thing.
The diploma is easy to see.
The person becoming capable of earning it is harder.
The confidence.
The judgment.
The resilience.
The ability to recover from mistakes.
The ability to laugh at yourself.
The ability to keep going when things do not go according to plan.
Those are harder to measure.
They are also the things most likely to matter.
Eventually the final name was called. Families poured onto the field carrying flowers, cameras and enough pride to power Park City for a week.
Graduates disappeared into photographs, celebrations and futures not yet written.
The beach ball was nowhere to be found.
Deflated, presumably.
But I kept thinking about it on the drive home.
For 15 seconds, an entire graduating class forgot about transcripts, scholarships, college decisions, speeches, expectations,and whatever comes next.
They shared a single objective.
Keep the beach ball alive.
Maybe that’s not the worst lesson to take into adulthood.
Hold onto your curiosity.
Hold onto your sense of humor.
Hold onto the parts of yourself that are not performing for anyone else.
And when something joyful drifts overhead every once in a while, keep it in the air a little longer.
Heather Bryant is a Park City resident, writer, longtime educator and mother of three. She writes educational curriculum and essays on parenting, conservation and the importance of place.