 Hello to the Ford School faculty, family, friends, and of course the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy graduating class of 2021. My name is Sydney Gardner Brown and today I am graduating with all of you into the unknown. All of our lives we've been taught and trained to be amazing academics and thinkers and dancers and future lawyers and activists. Most importantly though we've been trained to be planners. Let me tell you about my plans for my college career and I'm sure plenty of you can relate. I'd come to Michigan in 2017 to study biology. I'd make the cheer team, obtain a 4.0 GPA, have an amazing full four years on campus and then when it was time on May 1st, 2021, which at the time seemed like eons away. I'd sit in the big house with my friends and my family cheering me on as I graduated proud and fulfilled. Well, many of those things did not happen that way. It wasn't in my plan four years ago to switch gears and study public policy. I didn't make the cheer team, which makes sense because I had no prior gymnastics or cheerleading experience before I tried out. I didn't plan to complete my entire senior year through Zoom calls at home in Detroit. And the worst part is that after four years of looking forward to this day on campus in the big house, we're graduating through a screen. As good at planning as we thought we were, none of us could have planned or predicted how this year would unfold. The reality is that we've all been trying to predict a future full of infinite possibilities that are impossible to plan for. The implications of this fact can be scary. Sometimes I'm scared too. How can we be sure that things will go well if we can't plan our every move? Well, we can't be sure. As David Levitan said in the Lover's Dictionary, the mistake is thinking that we can find an antidote to the uncertainty. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty grim. But there is an upside to all of this. If the only thing that we can predict is that life will keep being unpredictable, maybe we should focus less on some predetermined destination and live more fully in the journey. As Rilke wrote, try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be giving you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. So I ask all of you today, can we find solace in the not knowing? Can we live the question? I think we can. I think we already have. Last summer we saw what it looked like when we individually and as a collective were confronted with a new awareness of an old reality. In the context of rising understanding around police brutality, the cruelty of the prison industrial complex, and the unveiling of the condition of systemic oppression, we asked ourselves hard questions about our complicity, about our privilege, and about our responsibility. And we didn't just ask ourselves those questions, we lived them. In the midst of a global pandemic, people across identities found amazing and creative ways to organize, fundraise, and come together however they could. Nobody planned on any of that. But guided by important questions, we improvised to make important and necessary change. That is but one of many examples of what it looks like when we leaned into a moment that felt unbearable and unpredictable and hard. We've done it. You've done it. I like the way that U of M alum, Andy Traitnater, Gilda Radner put it. I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, taking the moment, having to change, and making the best of it without knowing what's going to happen next. So my charge for all of you today, as we embark on this life, as you all matriculate through law school, or Washington, D.C., or consulting firm, or home, or a master's program across the Atlantic, release the chokehold you have on the destination. Let your values, your curiosities, your passions, let them guide you, live the question. It may not take you where you thought you were headed, but it's going to take you exactly where you need to go. Good luck and go Blue.