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Today we'll be sharing a special episode that is part of a series that we've created of the greatest graduation speeches of all time.

There have been some fantastic commencement talks over the past few decades and we've collected the best of the best for you to enjoy as soon as we get back from thinking our sponsors.

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Welcome to the graduation speech of best selling author John Green and this took place at Kenyan College back in 2016.

17 years ago I was supposed to be graduating from Kenyan. It ended up taking me an extra semester but I was in the audience that day with my friends and classmates.

I remember nothing about the commencement address except that it lasted 10,000 years. Empires rose and fell and still the speaker droned on.

Sir Cotta like in his monotony so I come to you today with one solemn promise one way or another this will be over in 14 minutes.

I want to spend one of those minutes if you don't mind in silence. This is a trick I learned from the children's TV host Fred Rogers.

If you don't mind I'd like us all not just the students but all of us to close our eyes and think for a minute just a minute about the people who love us up into this moment family and friends teachers and kind strangers all keep the time.

Those people they are so proud of you right now my thoughts turned in and it'll be back to my years back at Kenyan to my professors especially dawn Rogan who died this school year professor Rogan was a brilliant teacher but I've forgotten much of what I learned in his classes about the theology and gospel red action.

What I remember most is he loved me and that he took me seriously he and his wife Sally welcome me into their home fed me laugh with me cried with me for many years I wondered why he loved me I was not a particularly good or committed students I showed no special promise and then when he died I saw the grease stricken Facebook post pour in from his old students and I realized he loved us all.

Love is not like mass or energy it is not conserved and in the next 17 years you will forget a lot but you will not forget the kindness and generosity of those on this hilltop who are kinder and more generous and they needed to be.

So when I was a student here there was widespread agreement among my peers that the so called real world of proper adulthood was basically a disease you caught and then eventually died from adulthood with its mortgages and spreadsheets and lawn maintenance seemed to be a thing to be dreaded and resisted until finally it overtook you like a zombie plague once you acquired adulthood you start saying things like brand awareness and a fractured media landscape and we need a

president who knows how to get things done to be an adult and engaging in totally unironic conversations about the weather I remember once when I was in canyon my grandmother called me to tell me that she was watching the weather channel and it looked like it was raining in Ohio I explained to her that I was reading Ulysses that I wasn't even in Gambier but instead in Dublin Ireland in 1904 that history of a night marathon was deadless was trying to awake that nothing literally nothing matter less than the current.

And then after a moment she asked well is it raining or isn't it to be an adult was to be a river rock blasted by an endless torn of mundane terrors from resume formatting to electricity bills that would inevitably smooth all my hard edges until I looked and felt just like everything else.

Now this is the part of the commencement address room supposed to tell you in fact that adulthood isn't so bad and blah blah blah blah but no no it is so bad if anything it is far worse than I could have even ever imagined.

I mean have you ever been to a homeowner's association meeting each of you in the class of 2016 is wondrous and precious and rare life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe.

Imagine devoting two hours of your bright but brief flicker of consciousness to a debate over whether the maximum allowable length of grass in your neighborhoods front lawn should be four inches or six but it's true you will debate grass length or something equally stultifying.

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