My 6:32 minute graduation speech

Making a Little Difference
Convocation, BYU Life Sciences, August 2012
Riley Rackliffe

As an environmental science major my favorite classroom is the great outdoors. I love that classroom so much that I spent most of grade school, high school, as well as many of my years at BYU wandering the wildernesses of Utah. I frequently attended my mountain classroom with or without professors. I love mountains. I love the challenge of forcing my feet up a long slope. Climbing mountains, so readily available around Provo, brought me peace and perspective when I felt myself getting lost in the little things of life.

When I sit on top of a mountain, especially one of the Wasatch to our east, I look on the city below and think of all the people living out their lives under my feet. I watch the line of cars on the freeway stretching into the next valley and the loaded parking lot of the mall and wonder where everyone is going. I always try to find my apartment and without exception, I’ve been impressed by how insignificant my functional niche seems in the context of the whole. I can see the line of mountains beyond the valley and know there are more towns, and more people, far beyond the visible horizon.

When I come down from my perch I feel a sense of empowerment, a drive to rise a little higher and be a little better as President Hinckley told us from this pulpit. After hiking I feel like I understand my life better than I did before. I am tired, and dirty, and have slightly larger holes in my shoes yet I have more energy. Graduating from college is a lot like climbing a mountain. It is hard. It takes persistence and effort and lots of time. It’s really helpful when your mom packs you a lunch. You may even have slightly larger holes in your shoes than you did before. When you get to the top the view is incredible. Your perspective has enlarged and you see things that you didn’t before.

One of my favorite mountains that I have climbed was about the same height as Y Mountain. I was with a group of BYU students. We got out of bed in the early morning, 4 am if I recall correctly. It was a three mile hike in the dark. The 80 of us, interestingly Chelsea was with me, joined hundreds of other pilgrims and Bedouins in the effort to be on top of Mt Sinai by the time the sun rose. The Bedouins each had a camel which they constantly offered to us for the rest of the hike. Declining the camel rides we summited by foot. We sat up there in the chill of the desert dawn and sang hymns as the sun lit up the barren world of jagged pink granite rocks around us. It was an incredible journey and a spectacular view.

Chelsea was the other speaker, we were in the same Jerusalem Study abroad group.

After spending as much time up there as we could we finally turned our shoes to the trail and began the long trek down. This is where the environmental science major in me came out. Sinai is a volatile place where conservation is relatively unimportant. With thousands of tourists wandering the mountains trash is a major problem. There are a few small cans along the trail but they are largely ignored. Having been well trained by the boy scouts I pulled out my empty lunch sack and started filling it with empty water bottles and granola wrappers on the way down. I found my plastic sack filling far too quickly so I unloaded it in the nearest can. A Bedouin stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was just throwing away some trash. He seemed confused as I continued filling the sack with more trash.

The same thing happened a few hundred feet later at the next trash can when I unloaded again. The Bedouins all looked at me with strange expressions. In that somewhat halting British English the Bedouins speak, I was told that I was a good boy as they acknowledged my efforts with approving nods. I felt like Americans picking up trash was one of the strangest things they had seen.

One of my fellow hikers saw me scramble off the trail a little bit to get a wayward bottle and wondered aloud that I would risk my life to pick up someone else’s plastic. I don’t mean to brag about my trash collecting skills. (Although I encourage you to pick up trash any time you are walking about). The point is to always leave a place better than you found it. Even simple acts can have a profound impact on people around you. For the rest of my time in that part of the world I noticed my fellow students occasionally stuffing their own lunch sacks with trash collected around that ancient land.

We have all been climbing this mountain of education. We are about to receive degrees. We have been given a little time on top of this vista so we can gain perspective on the world around us and learn our place in it. We will soon go forth to whatever part of the earth will next be our home. I would encourage you to use what we have learned from this journey to make a positive difference in the world, wherever we go. It doesn’t matter how big your trash sack is. What matters is that we make a difference. We are responsible for making our piece of the world a better place, whether that means taking care of a city, a city park, or a parking strip. We have been given these years to prepare to serve the world. Keep Smiling, and let’s make the world a little better than we found it.
Thank you.