A commencement isn’t just a long, often dull ceremony associated with graduation. It actually means to make a beginning, and since life is a series of beginnings (and endings and new beginnings), commencement speeches aren’t just for graduates, they’re for all of us (particularly those of us who dare to be lifelong students).
If we are truly to learn, to grow, to become our very best selves, we must be willing and open students. After all, it’s only when the student is ready that the teacher will come! If we’re closed, uncurious, defensive in our ideologies and theologies, we won’t learn. We can’t. All we can do is continue to see what we expect to, continue to have confirmed for us what we already believe. It’s sad—no it’s more than that. It’s tragic, but most of us are stiff-necked, unteachable, ego-centered, missing moment after moment, opportunity after opportunity to learn, to grow, to evolve.
During this commencement season, I’d like to offer two profound books—both of which are transcripts of speeches by two brilliant writers.
I’m not recommending you buy these for your niece who’s graduating college or your wife’s cousin’s son who’s graduating high school—it’s fine if you do, but I’m recommending that you and I read them, hear them, consume them, digest them, live them.
Part of the reason Anna Quindlen’s “A Short Guide to a Happy Life” was published was because her speech was written, but never given. It’s a shame the students at the institution she was uninvited to didn’t get to hear her elegant, insightful, truthful speech, but it’s wonderful that it’s available to all of us in a small, picture-filled gift book.
Among the many erudite things in this small volume, Quindlen says, “I suppose the best advice I could give you is: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion. Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love and who love you. Get a life in which you are generous. Get a life where you live by the words of this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks: Exhaust the little moment, soon it dies. And be it gash or gold, it will not come again in this identical disguise. Get a life where you remember that life is short. The knowledge of our mortality is the greatest gift God ever gave us.”
Get a life! Get Anna Quindlen’s “A Short Guide to a Happy Life” to learn how.
Just as profound, but far more heartbreaking, is David Foster Wallace’s commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College, published as “This is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.”
The four-thousand word speech is so simple it’s sublime and makes a nice companion to Quindlen’s.
Wallace, who has been called the greatest writer of his generation, asks the questions: How does one keep from going through his or her comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion?
The short speech captures Wallace's inimitable intellect and his humble grace, blending casual humor with practical philosophy.
Since his suicide, the speech and now the book have become a kind of cult classic, but it needn’t have taken that for this wise, kind talk to find a wide audience.
I often say that the best education doesn’t teach us knowledge or even wisdom so much as teach us how to be students for life, and I think this is true—that the bulk of our truest education is gained on our own once we have the tools, openness, humility, and desire to learn.
Wallace tackles a slightly different, but related notion—that a liberal arts education isn’t about filling you up with knowledge, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather the choice of what to think about.”
We all have the freedom not only to choose to think or not, but what we think about.
He goes on to say, “But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught to think.”
And what should we do with this freedom to think about what we want to? Wallace argues (and I couldn’t agree more) that we apply it toward compassion, toward deprogramming our default settings of self-centeredness and unconsciousness and instead think compassionately about those we encounter today—regardless of what reaction we receive from them.
Both Quindlen and Wallace are wise guides for good lives. Get their books and get to commencing—to getting a life of love and meaning and generosity—then do what the brilliant Frederick Buechner says to do: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are sacred moments and life itself is grace.”
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