Teamwork is a combined action, cooperation. My fellow graduates and I all learnt the importance of teamwork upon the threshold of our graduation and final days in school that we spent together as a community. Also, that is what we became, a community, a self-helping body of people. Towards the time that our high school graduation prom preparations were underway, my friends and I were forced to learn about the importance of combined efforts. I have come to realize that if we remained stubborn in our views, we would have all made enemies of each other by the end of the school year and not have had anything to look back on and reminisce.
        However, it was not as easy as one might imagine. So many little things stood in our way, and so many issues upset different people. The disagreements that we faced were not easy to overcome, even if they seemed small and not worth the argument. The biggest dilemmas we encountered were where to have the prom and who to invite, since only allowing the graduates to come would mean a very small party since we studied in a small-community school. Normally, these issues would have been resolved with a few kind words and a little leniency. However, at the time, we were also preparing for our graduation, our final examinations, and trying to finish writing every assignment and paper which all seemed to be due at the same time. The stress was tearing us apart and giving everyone an excuse to argue and fight.
        Nevertheless, we all came out as survivors in the end. We all graduated and had a wonderful prom and an unforgettable graduation ceremony. We all came out the better and the wiser; all of us became closer as we held onto the memories that we shared during our years together. These memories are mostly embedded into our being because of the joint effort we had to put in to achieve what we did, with managing all of the fund raisers and preparations. We also had a lot of fun with the garage sales and bake sales that we held, and we certainly learnt a lot from that, too. We learnt how to best bargain with the buyers, for example, and how to best convince them to make purchases of second-hand items we both knew they did not really need.  Also, we had some humorous obstacles to overcome as people came and asked where they could find the washing machines and bedroom sets, which, of course, we did not have since we were all simply a group of 17-year-olds.
        I believe, though, that the most disappointing impediment for me was to discover that my closest friends and companions could so easily turn on me and oppose every possible solution that was put through. Some friends that I had shared some very trying times with all of a sudden did not even want to talk to me simply because I was taking the opposing side in the continuous argument of who was to be right and what should be done. Still, in the long run, we all realized our mistakes and learnt how to best rid ourselves of them and overcome them. We made it possible to be able to all sit in the same room without starting to scream at each other and simply have a well-organized debate on what should be done. In the end, we managed to surprise even ourselves with what we had achieved on the "first night of the rest of our lives," which became the theme of our prom night and how a lot of us decided to regard our future.
        Now, months later, and with all of us spread to the four corners of the world, we keep in touch and laugh and cry together about those times we shared and wish we could have them again, even if only for a day. Our lives are all headed in different directions with the different lives we will chose and different careers we will undertake. However, we will all accomplish and get what we want from life because we learnt how to be focused. Mostly we learnt that by being able to hold together and always think about the next step, and not how difficult the here-and-the-now was. We knew that time would pass and later we would look back and laugh at the simplicity of the matter that we could not see at the time. We realized the importance of combined effort and now know that without it we would not have been able to achieve anything, because individually, we had nothing; however, when we stuck together we could always do more and were one-step ahead.