Dear President Zheng, Vice President Zheng, distinguished guests, students, faculty, and parents and, most importantly, our graduates:
Welcome to Shanghai Hongrun Boyuan School’s 2023 Commencement.
This year we celebrate the accomplishments of our school with a sense of renewal and openness, in a world emerging from three of the most challenging years in recent history. We have faced difficulties together, we have supported one another, and we have grown to recognize the importance of relationships, of responding to uncertainty, and adapting dynamically to realize our full potential.
For our graduates, today marks a transition toward greater independence and greater responsibility. Everyone here at SHBS has done our best to prepare you for this, as have your families and parents with their patience and love and support.
We all share in your opportunity, and the need to continue exploring, to continue discovering, to continuing growing through the joys and contradictions we call life. The greatest challenge is to avoid stasis, to eschew a retreat into complacency, to combat the certainty of our own already-formed views.
How to do this?
The most interesting, the most compelling and inspiring people I know share two traits: they read books, and they travel.
They might scroll social media, they might browse the news, they might enjoy TV or the movies, but they still and more often read big, thick, old-fashioned books that sustain compelling arguments, narrate complex events, or artfully craft intricate fictional universes. We can lose ourselves in such books, we can deepen our intellect and emotions, we can improve our discernment and discover new things about our worlds and our selves, and we emerge as fuller people.
If books take our minds to new places, travel gives us the chance to explore the wonderful perceptive stimulus of new environments. By travel I don’t mean shopping or chasing after photos for WeChat moments: I mean putting your phone away, getting lost, embracing differences, and learning how to spend time with yourself. Visit museums. Attend concerts. Wander the early morning streets of a new city and watch a world come alive; hike into the wilderness; walk along rugged coastlines, dipping your toes in frigid water; sit, simply, and watch and listen.
