Graduation: A Lesson from The Velveteen Rabbit

Staff Editorial

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." ~from The Velveteen Rabbit

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For odd reasons, at the time of this writing, I have just finished reading the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Perhaps you know the story. Maybe it was read to you as a child by a parent or grandparent or teacher; or, maybe it was what we might call today an “Early Reader--” one of the first books you read as a child…maybe one you checked out from the library!

The story is simple: a stuffed rabbit wishes to be real; a boy loves him and declares it to be so; then, the boy falls sick with scarlet fever and, after he recovers, the rabbit, along with other toys must be burned. Because the rabbit had been loved, a fairy brings him to a meadow where the rabbit discovers that, at last, he is truly real.

If nothing else, this story is a story of “becoming.” We have a lot of “coming of age,” or “reinvention” stories in our modern society. Another word for these type of “becoming” stories might be “graduation stories.”

Graduation may be defined as the “tempering (or) refining of something to a certain degree.” It is closely related to the word, “gradual,” meaning, “arranged” or “taking place by degrees.” For many of our patrons who are in high school or college, this definition may hit very close to home.

For the “graduate,” there is always a level of heightened expectation before the graduation event. Pressures from within and without: What to do? Who to become? How long? Why? Yet, as I look at these questions, it seems as though they are queries that are made throughout the course of life, and not regulated to times celebrated by a graduation ceremony.

As I think more intently on this idea of graduation, graduation seems to be a way of life. With or without ceremony, we move through the stages of life: infancy, childhood, youth, adulthood, relationships, parenthood, grandparenthood, retirement, and, eventually, the final graduation comes to us all.

The truth is, if we choose to grow, despite the tempering and refining, then we graduate. However, if we choose to “drop out,” to refuse to graduate to the next stage of life because, as the Skin Horse warns in The Velveteen Rabbit, it sometimes hurts, then we choose not to be loved, we choose not to become real.