UPON REFLECTION
For some strange reason I’ve saved a few commencement speeches. Go figure! After forty years, what do you think upon reflection?
A Commencement Speech at Villanova
8/01/01
by Anna Quindlen
“It’s a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It’s an honor to follow my great-uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce.
“I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage talking to you today. I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
“Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for reelection because he has been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed, I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
“Don’t ever forget these words my father send me on a postcard last year: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”
“Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
“You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree. There will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of you mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account but your soul.
“People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter’s night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the test results and they’re not so good.
“Here is my resume:
“I am a good mother to my three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent.
“I no longer consider myself center of the universe.
“I show up
“I listen
“I try to laugh
“I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say.
“I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch.
“I would be rotten, or at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true. You cannot really be first rate at your work if your work is all you are.
“So here’s what I want to tell you today:
“Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your body?
“Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. “Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter.
“Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer, cigarettes, or junk food and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or big sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.
“It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.
“I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would have never changed it all.
“And what I learned from it is what today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try and give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned.
“By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy.
Live life with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.”
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What I Wish They’d Told Me at Graduation
Rod Dreher
May 22, 2009
The bad news, high school graduates, is that you can’t have it all. You aren’t as free as you think you are. Sorry, but no matter what optimistic flapdoodle your commencement speaker tells you, that’s the truth.
The good news is that somebody’s telling you this now, before you have to discover it on your own. I wish somebody had told me the same thing when I was under the mortarboard almost 25 years ago.
That morning, I was furious at my father. My friends were headed off to prestigious East Coast universities. I had a state-university scholarship, while my Ivy-bound classmates were taking out big student loans. Dad, jerk that he was, told me he couldn’t let me go deeply into debt to finance an undergraduate degree.
As it turned out, that was one of the best things he ever did for his son. “Avoid debt” is a fairly prosaic prescription, but you’ll find life is far more prosaic than you think. A meaningful life is not usually built on grand gestures but, rather, on the habitual accumulation of ordinary ones.
A few years ago, I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the south tower of the World Trade Center collapse. In the minute I had before police closed the bridge, I had to decide whether to turn back to Brooklyn to protect my wife and child or make a break for lower Manhattan and risk my life reporting on the biggest story of my lifetime.
I chose the dull, dutiful thing: to go home and look after my family. We now know that had I run toward the disaster, I almost certainly would have survived, would have gotten a great story and had tales of high adventure to tell my colleagues.
But there were countless small decisions I’d made all my life before that fierce moment. I realized in the crucible that my family meant more to me than my career. Perhaps I chose wrongly, but I don’t think so. The point is, by training myself to put my family first, I had made the decision to go home before I decided it.
Sooner or later, most of us will face our moment on the bridge. The little choices you make between now and then will determine what you do when it really matters.
What’s more, unless you’re an incurable romantic or an American politician, you eventually will learn that life is more tragic than you were led to believe. You will discover your own limits. You will fail at something, even if you succeed by the standards of the world.
That failure may save you; success may destroy you. A friend grew comfortably wealthy in high finance but looked around one day, horrified to see what luxury had done to his colleagues’ character. Shaken, he left the firm and embraced his ancestors’ Judaism. He eventually quit finance entirely, fearing the inevitable consequences of Wall Street’s money-driven collective madness. They all thought they were invincible.
Four months later, the stock market crashed. Every one of his friends was wiped out. What happened to them is tragic, in a way, but not the worst thing. Leon Bloy, the French Catholic novelist, had it right when he ended one of his novels with the following line: “There is but one tragedy, not to be a saint.”
In secular terms, this means the only thing that matters is a life of self-sacrificing virtue, whether a prince’s or a pauper’s. People wonder how to get what they want but rarely think about what they should want. Don’t be true to thine own self; be true to the truth. Most of us will never become rich or famous or even be remembered over time. But the capacity for everlasting greatness, as Bloy saw, lies within us all.
You don’t fully control your fate, but you do control the formation of your character. That matters in ways we cannot foresee and can only appreciate once we lose the illusion that we are self-created. George Eliot ended her novel Middlemarch with a line about the effect, over time, of ordinary goodness lived out by ordinary people like us: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
That’s not optimistic, but it is true. It’s the kind of realistic hope you can build a life on. And should.
Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com
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Commencement Address
Berkshire School, Sheffield, MA
by Susan Crown (parent of a graduate)
Berkshire School Class of 2009, congratulations!! As we say in the Midwest…. you look like a bumper crop.
So let’s all just take a moment to celebrate all you’ve achieved. And perhaps this is a fitting time to express appreciation to the faculty, the friends, the college counselors and dorm parents, the folks who fed you and kept the heat working and lights on, and your families who have supported, nurtured and been there for you throughout your upper school years. Your families are incredibly proud of you. I’m sure you realize that this is the perfect time to ask for money.
In preparation for these remarks today, I’ve randomly asked about 100 people over the past few months’ two pointed questions: Who spoke at your high school commencement? Do you remember what was said?
Without exception– NOT A SINGLE SOUL—including yours truly– had any recollection about their high school graduation speaker. So, happily, the heat is off, knowing that there is virtually no chance you’ll recall anything I say today. Still, you’re compelled to listen politely for a few minutes. Gary Trudeau defined commencement speeches as rituals “invented in the belief that outgoing students should never be released into the world until they’ve been properly sedated.”
Berkshire School was founded in 1907 with the mission of interweaving classical education with appreciation for the beautiful mountain which serves as a lodestar to this institution. Founder and legendary headmaster, Seaver Burton Buck, summed up the school’s mission in crisp New England style: “to teach boys (boys!!) to work hard, to play hard.” So I ask you now, members of the class of 2009, which of you worked hard? Played hard? I dare say Mr. Buck would be proud of you today, just as Mr. Maher is.
This is a very special community for living and learning. I know I speak for everyone here today when I say that we are grateful to be part of the Berkshire family.
You are the last class– of the first decade–of the 21st century. In your short lives, you’ve seen so many things that will “matter” in the history books. You’ve seen the world knit itself together, and tear itself apart, in extreme and entirely new ways. You’ve seen unprecedented escalations in connection and in isolation. You’ve witnessed acts of war, bids for peace, and revolutionary changes in politics, in technology, in economics, and in communication. Rest assured, as the new century unfolds, there will be plenty more for you to see, events that will help to frame and shape your life choices.
You stand at an amazing juncture today; at the end of one chapter and the beginning the next. Some part of you is fully aware of how formative these years have been. The rest—no doubt—will sink in over time.
Right now, you face the most staggering array of choices ever in your life. Your choices matter. Here’s why… adulthood begins about ten choices before you realize it does.
There are no shortcuts to experience and no simple remedies to choices. These are the things that lead you to mature and season. So base your choices, your experiences, on what matters most to you so they really count. The sum total of them is what defines you as a human being.
At risk of using a late night pundit cliché, I’ve put together a “Top 18 List” (isn’t 18 the average age here?) of what I – with the help of some of history’s greatest thinkers—believe matters most in guiding life choices. A little disclaimer before communicating my list; advice is generally worth just what you pay for it.
For whatever it is worth, here ‘tis:
1) Laugh at yourself. Question yourself. But never doubt yourself.
2) According to Henry Ford, “Your best friends will be the friends who bring out the best in you.” Hold true friends carefully, with both of your hands.
3) Break a few rules, make a little trouble, but only stir things up and take costly risks on behalf of something you believe in. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren observed that “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for. “
4) Know the difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is temporary, fleeting. Joy, by contrast is unpredictable; it derives from pursuing real interests and passions. Seek joy, not just happiness.
5) Have a dream; the dream is why you get out of bed in the morning. Then chase your dream with a sense of complete entitlement. Captain of “The Dream Team” Michael Jordan, once said that, “You have a right to expect things of yourself before you do them.” Pursue your dream, and you’ll never wonder why you’re dragging yourself to a dull job every day.
6) The great musician Arthur Rubenstein remarked that “if you love life, it will love you back.” A positive attitude makes all the difference. My favorite quote on this matter comes from the world’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein: “There are two ways to live your life. One is thought nothing is a miracle. The other is though everything is a miracle.”
7) Here’s one I’ve thought about a lot recently. The small, the ignorant, the petty will never stop trying to reduce you. Take the hit. It’s better than joining their ranks. Keep your distance from people who belittle you and your ambitions. Mark Twain observed that “Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
8) Learn how to co-exist with your fears. Know the difference between danger and fear. Living fearlessly is not the same as being afraid of things. In a fearful world, try to be the fearless ones.
9) Christopher Morley stated “There is only one success– to be able to spend your life in your own way and not to give others absurd and maddening claims on it.” The most direct route to unhappiness is to build a life based on the expectations of others. Locate your own passion; then use it as your equator for constructing your life.
10) Vince Lombardi, the world’s most winning football coach, said that “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, or a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.” If you’re looking for perseverance, excellence, honors, and heroism, look within. It’s the place you’re most likely to find it. And by so doing, you develop radar that enables you to spot these qualities in others.
11) When you’re choosing which way to go in life, just know that if you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere. (Frank Clark) Failure can be brutal, sometimes incapacitating. The only sane way to view failure is as something intensely interesting.
12) Incidentally, I offer you a new definition of the term “net worth.” Your net worth really has nothing to do with what you accumulate across your lifetime; it’s actually much more of a tally of what you’ve given to others. You’ll just have to trust me on this one, because you may not understand this until you’re old…I mean older.
13) And, by the way, the most efficient way to accelerate the aging process is to stop learning. You can choose to stop learning at 25, at 45, at 85 or never. Here, at Berkshire, you’ve been given an extraordinary gift: you’ve learned how to learn. Lifelong learning keeps you vital, awake, and alive. Andy McIntyre pointed this out with a great expression: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!”
14) Some faculty members here may disagree…but Machiavelli was dead wrong. The ends never justify the means; the ends ARE the means. You are accountable not only for what you do, but how you do what you do.
15) Wisdom is like frequent flyer miles and scar tissue; you tend to accumulate it by accident, and when you’re trying to do something else (Kingsolver)
16) So, think big thoughts, but don’t forget to enjoy small pleasures. Here I can’t resist quoting that iconic high school senior, Ferris Bueller. Remember when he stared directly into the camera and nonchalantly remarked, “Life moves pretty fast. If ya don’t stop and look around once in a while, you’re going to miss it.”
17) Your moral compass is in fine working order; trust it. Your real obligation is to be true to yourself, to be a positive force in this world. Never sell out. Janis Joplin said it best: “Don’t compromise yourself; you’re all you’ve got.”
18) And item last. As you leave Berkshire, remember what you loved most about this place. And be especially nice to faculty; they have relatives EVERYWHERE.
So there it is; an attempt to offer sage advice by offering up a list of what matters most. Use my list like a set of starting blocks. Place your feet inside. Then set your own course, your own pace.
I do realize I’m supposed to tell you to go out and change the world, challenge you to do everything better than the generations that preceded you. I don’t know how many of you are interested in that. What I can tell you I that I have hopes and prayers invested in you, many of whom are strangers. I believe you’ll also invest your hopes and prayers in strangers in the days ahead. The world you now take up is like an old piece of clay with a million thumbprints on it. Handle it reverently.
Now, I can’t let this moment pass without saying something quite personal and sentimental to our graduate. Nicholas… great haircut. Your Dad, sister and I are proud of you, today –every day. We love you wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, to the moon and back again.
I conclude my little part in this rite of passage by quoting a world class philosopher, Jerry Seinfeld.
“Life is a ride. We’re all strapped in and no one can stop it. When the doc slaps your behind when you are born, your ticket has been ripped and away you go. As you make each passage from infancy to adolescence, adulthood to old age, sometimes you’ll put up your arms and scream, sometimes you’ll just hang on to the bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. The most you can hope for is that in the end your hair is messed up, you’re smiling and somewhat breathless.”
Congratulations Class of 2009. I believe in you. I have no doubt that during the ride of your life you will make choices based on what matters most.
