Dear Soon-To-Be-Graduates,

15,552,000 seconds accumulate to create 259,200 minutes.

259,200 minutes join forces to form 4,320 hours. Believe it or not, all of these individual numbers are the approximate time you have spent at school over the past four years, and these integers have inadvertently changed you. If you were the stereotypical high schooler, you passed time in classes by whispering to your friends to tune out your teachers. In "silent" classes, whether you were artistic or not, you doodled in your notebooks and pretended to be the next Pablo Picasso so you could keep yourself occupied. I guarantee most of you spent at least a few of your 4,320 hours sitting at an uncomfortable desk counting down the seconds on the archaic clocks until the last bell rang for dismissal.

Don't worry, you will no longer "waste" time sweating in stuffy classrooms with few windows unless you choose to further your education. Your time to be liberated from the high school that you have referred to as "jail" has come. The bells that released you from your prison cells every forty minutes or so will be an intruding resonance of the past. Are you truly ready to be introduced to freedom? Did you use your time wisely over the past four years in high school? Will you know how to autonomously govern yourself without the rigid restrictions that guided you for the past twelve years of your schooling career?

Most of you have been counting down the seconds until graduation before senior year even began. A lot of you have dreamed of this day since you were freshmen. A small handful of you, on the other hand, are wishing time would stop because everything is happening so quickly.

You, my friends, are the real unsung heroes of your class because you are making your best efforts to cherish the little time that you have left in your town instead of pushing your way through life like a shopper at Walmart on Black Friday. The great singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan, has said, "the times, they are a-changin'," and these lyrics could not be closer to the truth. Your lives are about to be massively disrupted, and while most of your realize that your reign is now over, few of you have taken the time to truly ponder what this means for your future.

In a few short months, every single person from your class will be on a new journey. A majority of you will march on to colleges and universities across the globe. Some of you will take a year off to gather your thoughts and figure out what you want to do with your lives. A select few will jump right into a career. Whatever path each of you choose will be the right one for you.

Now, I don't mean that you will love every second of your new adventure. In fact, some of you may hate it and decide to turn around to take a divergent trail, and I am here to remind you that this is completely okay. Sometimes you need to taste two different flavors in order to notice that one delights you more than the other. The most important aspect of your new journey is the fact that you are deciding to leap into something new, and by doing this, you are destined to learn something worthwhile.

Some of you have gone to the same schools for twelve years now. You have watched each other metamorphosize from graceless, scraggly preteens into brilliantly beautiful young adults. The kids who accepted you before, during, and after your awkward stage will now be scattered across the nation, and this frightening factor of life may feel like a band-aid that has been swiftly and suddenly ripped from your skin. A painful sensation may surface when you realize that 2/3 of your lives were spent with classmates who are soon going to vanish in the blink of an eye into the treacherous trenches of their own individual hectic lives, never to reemerge.

You see, in high school, you were privileged enough to take a quick drive to school and see your clique every single day for five days per week. I will be the first to admit that all of us take this for granted because in college, your friend group will be split across the nation, and while you can reunite over breaks, maintaining those friendships won't be as uncomplicated and effortless as they once were.

However, you have to remind yourselves that the friendships that are worth saving will last if both parties put effort into the relationship. Friendship is a two-lane street, and it's as simple as Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. By the time you reach your fourth year of high school, you can name, give or take, 200 students from the school that you have personally connected with in one way or another. Obviously you cannot maintain close contact with all 200 people; therefore, you must hand pick the group that you desire to push forward onto the "next level" of friendship. Those who pass the friendship test, despite the giant obstacle course of distance and making new friends at college, will move onto further rounds of camaraderie that will test their trust, loyalty, and honor.

You must remind yourself that although a shiny new race car, so to speak, comes around for the competition, the interior of the automobile may not be entirely intact, therefore this vehicle may fail you when you need it the most. Never lose track of the old race car with the rusty exterior whose interior has never failed you and has made every attempt to help you along the bumpy road of life. Remember that the people who reach out to you, stay in touch, and hover next to you through thick and thin are the types of people that are worth keeping around.

I can assure you that there will be days that you will miss your little cell in high school because, over those four years, you transformed it into your home. You enjoyed gossiping with your friends in the hallways. You seemed to always crave one of those crumbly cookies from the cafeteria, and you caved into your desires sometimes too often. You longed for school dances because you loved dressing up and impressing your crush with your captivating allure. You could not wait to cheer on your friends as they competed in various sports. You secretly adored all of the simplicities of high school, no matter how many times you publicly denied it.

So, did you pass your time appropriately? Or did you spend your time counting down every second instead of making your seconds count? Many of you will realize that you devoted most of your four years doing the former instead of the latter. While it is too late to change this unfortunate mistake, you can take high school as a lesson and make the most your time with the rest of your future. Instead of focusing on emancipating yourself from your responsibilities, take the time to truly cherish the blessings in your life. After all, it only takes the conglomeration of a few small seconds for lives to be altered forever. From here on out, time is in your hands. How will you choose to spend it?

Sincerely,

A High School Graduate from the Class of 2015

*This article is dedicated to the Pope John XXIII Class of 2016, and it is also offered in memory of my own class, Pope John XXIII Class of 2015*