Today was graduation for my high school students. As I stood before the Class of 2025, what I saw—what I felt—was a sleeping lion.
It reminded me of a painting I’ve spent a great deal of time with lately—Sunday PM 4 by Seo Sang Ik. In it, a lion sleeps on a simple bed, head resting gently on the pillow, its massive paw clutching at the thin blanket like a child seeking comfort. The room is modest, the light soft through a plain window, and on the bedside table lie the cluttered remnants of modern life: a phone, a clock, the quiet anxieties of living in a world that never quite lets us rest.
But the lion—what strikes me most is the lion. This is no king on the hunt, no roaring symbol of dominance. It is a creature at rest, its power folded in on itself, dreaming perhaps of some distant plain or remembered fight. And in that vulnerable stillness, it becomes something more than a beast. It becomes a mirror.
Today, as I looked out over those rows of graduates, I saw that same quiet power. They wore their robes like kings and queens unaccustomed to their crowns. Their eyes flickered between excitement and hesitation, their smiles edged with the uncertainty of what comes next. And I thought: They don’t know yet who they are.
High school has been their long and wandering dream—a suspended time between the innocence of childhood and the sharpened responsibilities of adulthood. Like the lion in Sang Ik’s painting, they have stretched out in the comfort of familiar routines: the daily bell schedules, the locker-lined corridors, the easy camaraderie of shared struggle. Here, their strength remained latent, their battles mostly symbolic, their victories fought on basketball courts and theater stages, behind debate podiums and quiet classroom desks.
But all dreams must end. And today, it did.
Youth was but a dream, and now it is time to awake.
I wanted to tell them—as I tell myself—that waking is not an act of sudden violence. It is a slow gathering of self. A realization that the world is vast and often unkind, but also breathtakingly beautiful. That strength is not always found in roaring declarations, but often in quiet acts of courage: showing up, trying again, daring to hope.
Seo Sang Ik’s lion rests in a human bed, the great beast humbled by the small comforts of a too-short blanket and a borrowed space. But we know—don’t we?—that it won’t stay there forever. So too with these graduates. Their time of rest is over. Their strength, once hidden beneath the blankets of youth, will stir. It will rise. And the world will have to make room for them.
I think of the finality of this day, but also of its beginning. The philosopher Alan Watts once said, “The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”
This is the invitation I extend to them now: step out of the dream. Open your eyes. Know that you carry within you the quiet, immense power of the sleeping lion. And when the time comes—when you feel that first pull toward something greater—rise.
The dream is over. The world is waiting. And oh, what a sound it will make when you do.