Class of 2004

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
--Eleanor Roosevelt

We spend our lives waiting. We exist, we go through the motions of each day, and we wait for it to end so we can start over. And now, the countdown has reached zero, and we find ourselves at an ending. An ending that will start many beginnings to come. Four years of our lives are coming to a close, and we have waited for this moment for what seems like forever, but as we sit here again waiting for our lives to change as it did when we walked into these doors, memories of the hundred yesterdays flood our brains. For once, we’re not waiting for something, but simply existing in our moment, in our accomplishments, in our pride, and nostalgia. High school is a defining period in our lives, we become ourselves with the help of everyone, and sometimes without any help at all. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.” Within us is the hope of a future, the fulfillment of success, and the confusing emotions of unbelievable sadness, and euphoria. We have made it to 2004. We have made it to graduation.
Our time at Lely High School has been different for each of us. Some will refer to it as the best time of their lives, and some might heartily disagree. I believe that no matter what we have experienced, each of us have found many of our “one love’s” at Lely High. We have made friendships, and lost acquaintances. We made the grades, and watched them slip, and fought to get them back again. Our class has worked together on working together. I believe this class is a unit of beautiful people, who each have so much to give the world. It is with sadness we depart from Lely High School, but with the assuring knowledge that we can. Our teachers, our parents, and our friends have opened doors for us, and now it is only a matter of time before we will walk through them. We will walk through them confidently, with no regrets, without holding anything back. We will take what we have learned here and apply it to our everyday. We will never let the pride of Lely die.

Much of our lives are spent waiting. We wait for hope, for love, for happiness. We wait for it to be over, and then when it is, we wait for it to begin again. We wait for waiting, but do we wait so much that we forget to live? The past four years we have waited for the chance to end it all, to start again, to be free, and now that it is over, what are we going to wait for? Have we spent so much time within these walls wishing that we were somewhere else that we failed to enjoy our clean-well lighted place? We have grown up within these walls. Before we realized we were waiting for it, it happened. We grew. Today is at our grasp, tomorrow holds all the possibilities to be captured, and yesterday is ours to cherish, to keep and relish in. Yesterday is the one thing we do not have to wait for. I know we have all come to a point where we are going to stop waiting and start living in each moment. We will cherish the memories we have made, and not be afraid to create new ones. We will “come together, and be as one,“ remembering high school, and embarking on a new adventure. A new world waits for us, new challenges are going to be approached, and we will again work at being on top. “We were so much older than, we’re younger than that now.”
Thank you to our teachers, to Lely High School, to our parents, and thank you, to our friends. Congratulations to the class of 2004, because we’ve made it, at last.

May 21,2004