To the graduating Class of 2016, as you are soon to leave high school, I offer this advice. Take what you need:

Wear sunscreen. It’s good advice I heard in a Baz Luhrman song.

“Youth is wasted on the young” ¹ is a phrase you will one day understand, but only too late. You will wrinkle and gray, but know that youth is given in fair trade² for the wisdom you earn over time.

Be someone who makes you happy. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You are your own worst critic and only you have to live with your decisions. Life is far more flexible than you imagine.

If you get cut, watch yourself bleed. Understand time is doing the same thing to you. We are water and dust breathed into life with an expiration date. Death is inevitable. Accept this. Live as though the Grim Reaper may knock on your door tomorrow. One day, he will.

Admire the pageantry of humanity but do not believe it. We all wear silly hats. Mortarboards, for example.

Armchair complaints do not leave your living room. People join causes if they have no because, so be cause³. Fight for justice, question, protest, criticize, write and read letters, poetry, songs, speeches, sermons or legislation. The arc of history tends toward justice but you must participate to change the world.

Vote wisely in the ballot box, at the cash register and with your presence. Money is ink on cotton and paper which people trade you for time⁴. It does not buy happiness; you must find that on your own.

Every day, do something artistic so that when you reach old age, you have a lifetime of beauty to remember⁵.

Watch sunsets prayerfully, to learn why we first worshipped the sun and the moon. Count the stars, knowing that some will die tonight and never shine again. Name constellations in your honor. Invent their mythologies.

Spellcheck. If language is incorrect, what is said is not what is meant and what must be done remains undone.

The world is just one big small town. Treat its residents accordingly. Serve your community selflessly and it will repay in kind. Your youth, friends, lovers, coworkers and neighbors all come and go. Family will bind you to your ancestry and is the only thing that survives you. You are the microphone of your ancestors.

Forgive your parents; they were young once, too. Where they failed, do not⁶. Raise children intelligently, you owe it to your grandparents.

Teach your daughters to be warriors and your sons to be artists. They will find their own path when the time comes. Love them regardless.

Dance⁷. Your body is a gift that took billions of years to create. Use it unabashedly and unshamefully. If you are reading this, you are beautiful. Nothing is wrong with you⁸.

Be welcoming to strangers. Odin walks among us.

True friends will offer a lift when you’re stranded or a sofa for the night. Don’t overstay your welcome. Offer your own sofa. Build yourself an army so you have ground to go to.

Being hated for your honesty is more honorable than being loved for your deception. Lies are hard to remember but the truth is easy to corroborate. Plagiarists always get caught, so cite your sources.

Do not fear evil, instead fear the indifference of good men⁹. Never be indifferent. Anonymity is for cowards, so always sign your name. Proudly and in ink.

Be kind to the flowers¹⁰. You are not of Adam, you are not of Eve, we are of the tree, we are apples¹¹.

Embrace solitude, don’t fear it. It will save you on the lonely nights. Once a year, lay down in a gutter to learn how to sleep there if need be.

Send love letters, handwritten and in envelopes. Keep a box of all the love letters you receive. Attend weddings and funerals whenever possible. Ceremonies bind us to our history and remind us of our humanity.

If it is unclear, rephrase it. If it unusable, remove it. If it is imperfect, rework it until it is as much a part of you as a limb.

Write poetry, even if it never leaves your notebook. If it does, proclaim it loudly from the stage.

It takes guts to say “goodbye,”¹² “I’m sorry” and “I love you.” Be brave. Love like a brass section; love like brass knuckles¹³.

Words can kill, so use them wisely. Speak honestly and slow. Enunciate with conviction¹⁴. Your words will bind you when all else is lost.

Ask for advice from your elders. The best is offered free of charge. Take what you need and make a list. Change it whenever you change yourself^{15,16 and 17}. When you are old, offer advice to any open ears. Some may forget it, others may ignore it, but a handful may take your best lines and repeat them in ages and ages hence.

The past is unchangeable, the future is unknowable¹⁸. You live in the moment between them¹⁹. Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever. Become worth remembering.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor

1: From the French proverb, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait”

2: Paraphrased from Frank Miller’s comic book “Sin City,” in which the dying Detective John Hartigan says of Nancy Callahan “An old man dies, a little girl lives. Fair trade.”

3: A paraphrased quote from Sedona outsider and folk art painter Brian Walker.

4: From slam poet Seth Walker

5: “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,” Jack Kerouac, from “On the Road.”

6: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his,” Oscar Wilde, from “The Importance of Being Ernest”

7: “I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance,” Fred Astaire, from “Steps in Time”.

8: Paraphrased from “If This Poem,” by the late Sedona poet Christopher Lane.

9: On March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Despite 37 witnesses, no one called police, assuming someone else had. The New York Times condemned the witnesses in an editorial for their indifference to her murder.

10: From Flagstaff slam poet Jackson Morris, now teaching English in mainland China

11: From Sedona slam poet Evan Dissinger

12: From Flagstaff slam poet Ryan Brown, now teaching English in South Korea

13: From Sedona slam poet Claire Pearson

14: Paraphrased from New York slam poet Taylor Mali’s poem “Totally Like Whatever, You Know?”

15: See 2013

16: See 2014

17: See 2015

18: In special and general relativity, a light cone is the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime. If one imagines the light confined to a two-dimensional plane, the light from the flash spreads out in a circle after the event E occurs, and if we graph the growing circle with the vertical axis of the graph representing time, the result is a cone, known as the future light cone. The past light cone behaves like the future light cone in reverse, a circle which contracts in radius at the speed of light until it converges to a point at the exact position and time of the event E. In reality, there are three space dimensions, so the light would actually form an expanding or contracting sphere in three-dimensional (3D) space rather than a circle in 2D, and the light cone would actually be a four-dimensional version of a cone whose cross-sections form 3D spheres (analogous to a normal three-dimensional cone whose cross-sections form 2D circles), but the concept is easier to visualize with the number of spatial dimensions reduced from three to two.

19: George Patton, Nellie Bly, Neil Armstrong, Georgia O’Keeffe, Samuel Clemens, Rosa Parks, Andrew Carnegie and Ella Fitzgerald were all young and foolish once. We know them for what they did.