My dear young friends, and also the young friends who are a little older!

At this moment I am trying to guess what you must feel in your heart. I know what it means to finish school. Today you are facing a vast, unlimited space with a powerful feeling of freedom, with a feeling of great joy. This is the time when constantly, never missing a moment, you must make new choices, if they have not yet been made. These choices are yours to make. I will not teach you. I only wish to encourage you a little.
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All of you have friends, schoolmates, teachers, parents, brothers and sisters, any many others who are telling you that today it would be wise to study law or economics. Why not. There is a lot of demand in these professions just now and you will certainly find a proper job. But there is another way for you to get to know yourselves. In this other way, there is something of the tune that the Rapla band just played to us. This would mean finding the way where your heart, your talent leads you.

This may not necessarily be the most practical direction. Teachers, for instance, are not well paid. And it may indeed be so that very few people have recommended you to become a teacher. There are other professions where the salaries are not high. Now, you must understand one thing - you should not make conclusions concerning your whole future on the basis of this single beautiful moment, this one sunny day. Keep in mind that Estonia is still in the stage of development. Estonia needs all kinds of skills and every skill is most rewarding when it comes from the heart. We need engineers, we need welders, we need astronomers. We need someone to carry on with Jaan Einasto's work. Small Estonia, known to few, would thus become famous. Every country has brought something new to the world.

At the time when you were not even born, I happened to read a book with the heading ''Malta'', by a Hungarian writer. Reading it, I came upon a sentence: ''Why was I born so late? Now I will never have a chance to meet the famous Estonian astronomer Öpik!'' These words had been written far away in Hungary, and they had not been written by an astronomer.

What is it I am trying to tell you? First, I want to tell you that I partake of your great joy. This is a feeling of great freedom. This is the day when the making of new choices will start. I know that after finishing high school everybody thinks that he knows everything. On the other hand, when I graduated from the university, I already knew that I know nothing about the world. So remember this feeling of knowing everything about the world. Listen to what your parents tell you, listen to your friends, but first and foremost listen to your own heart. Do so, and happiness will be your companion through decades.

Congratulations to you all and thank you for coming to Kadriorg!


in Kadriorg, on 17, 1999

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