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By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, May 26, 2008
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 It’s the end of May. All over the country, hundreds of thousands of young people are getting ready to graduate. This week’s column is to them.
Listen
The first advice I have for you is, listen to advice. Especially from people older than yourself. I know older people aren’t very important to you right now—walking or talking with your friends, older people are somewhat invisible to you, but listen to them. They know what it’s like to be your age, and you have no clue what it’s like to be theirs. If you’re lucky, someday you will know what it’s like to be their age, and the stuff they told you—the stuff you thought didn’t apply to your life at all—will suddenly make sense.
Finish, and begin
Some of you will be leaving soon—if not your home, at least what’s been a big part of your life so far. You’ll be leaving for college, for the armed services, for a job, for the rest of your life.
 Some of you will feel like you’re escaping from a rigid, restrictive existence. This feeling can make you do stupid things, take chances you shouldn’t take.
Some of you may feel you’re being pushed from your warm, safe nest into the cold, cruel world too soon. This feeling can prevent you from trying new things, and having fun.
They’re just feelings: They emanate from you, not from the world around you. Try replacing those feelings with the feeling that you’ve finished one thing, and now it’s time to start something else.
Keep the lines of communication open
To your family, your friends, to all the people you’ve known all your life. You’re moving and changing, but don’t lose sight of what you’re leaving behind. Friendships, relationships, even love, all are based partly on shared experience, and the people who populated your early years have shared more with you than you will share with many others in your life. Never mind whether you like them right now—you’ll be surprised, at first, at how much people change and improve as you get older. Then one day you’ll realize it isn’t they who changed.
Move on, but leave a forwarding address.
No regrets
Try not to have regrets. To accomplish this, you only have to be happy with who you are right now, this minute, whenever this minute happens to be. If you’re happy with who you are, and you understand that it has taken everything that has happened in your life to make you the person you are, then—no regrets.
 Exercise your options
If you’re not happy with who you are now, you have two options: Wait or change. It’s easier right now to change than it will ever be again in your lifetime. Socrates told his students, "The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be." It was good advice around 410 B.C., and it’s good advice now. How do you wish people to see you? As smart? Kind? Funny? Deep? Well read? All of the above? Don’t waste time trying to look that way, start striving right now, to be that way.
Don’t stop
Don’t think for a second you’re finished learning. Whether you’re just getting out of high school, or college, you’re not done yet. In fact, you’ll find the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. This is a good thing.
Now—commence.
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