Commencement

Perhaps you are like me (and, if you are, let's start meeting regularly in someone's basement so we can plan our overthrow of everyone else) and you have prepared speeches stored in your long-term memory. Just in case I don't have prior warning, I have emergency speeches waiting in the wings of my brain to the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences (although it will be hard to improve on my favorite...when a screenwriter accepted her Oscar a few years back and simply thanked the Academy for seating her next to George Clooney), the Nobel Committee, the U.S. Senate and The Graduating Class of Whenever (high school and university).

I'm only truly qualified to speak to graduating classes since I lack a film or political career and have only contributed to the well-being of humanity by not littering. I have much to share on the topic of the human nest, however - living in it, and leaving it.

I don't remember who the commencement speaker was at my high school graduation, but I have graduated four times and attended many other graduations in the last thirty years. I am familiar with the template of the Graduation Speech, and have become ever more irritable when I hear its opening strains, "Class of XYZ, you stand on the brink of the future"...blah-di-blah-blah…"you have the power to realize your dreams"....yakity-yak…."go out a give back to the world"...drone-ramble. "...Hard work and never giving up"....ya-da, ya-da.

Those of us who have been "out in the world" for more than 20 minutes want to stand up, run up in front of the graduates, wave our arms (indicating great urgency) and yell, "NOOOOooooooo...GO BACK!!!! He's feeding you a load of crapdoodle!"

I know that speakers mean well. They have a hopeful audience, and the listeners want a little spiritual encouragement. No one wants to hear that, statistically, some of the class will struggle with substance abuse, chronic unemployment and domestic violence. Someone will become disabled or suffer from a severe health crises. Someone will join a bizarre religious cult. Many students will have marriages run aground and a few will end up doing jail time. Some students will achieve financial and professional success, while others will devolve to living in shelters and boxes. Many will fight depression. Some will fossilize into mean and greedy bullies and leave a trail of misery wherever they go. A very few will develop compassion and share their golden hearts with the world. Others will discover unsuspected artistic genius. Some will die too soon to realize their full potential. Some will be undermined by racism or discrimination or sexism. There are a million ways our young skiers on the slalom of life can end up missing a flag and go careening off to crash into the woods. It just seems best not to mention all of that at commencement and ruin the party.

High schools (and colleges, to a lesser extent) are institutions set up to recognize and nurture the students' interests and gifts. Some of this is preparatory for a life outside of school. Much of this falls more in the realm of social growth and development. Few of us parlay our hyper demonstrations of PEP, so critical to our position on the Jr. Varsity Cheerleading Squad, into an adult occupation. Often, high school sets students up for a fantasy life in which our art is admired, our ability to carry a ball some distance without being intercepted is revered and photographed, and getting all of the questions right is lauded. Teachers and parents pay constant attention to us and give us awards. We are praised for merely attending high school. We are rewarded for behaving civilly and not posing a threat to others. We are esteemed for even having a "good personality". The larger world is, sadly, not impressed.

I do not intend to foment dissatisfaction with the system of secondary education in America. But I do think that someone, somewhere should stand up at graduation and give students the merest morsel of meaningful, if slightly belated, perspective on the journey that is before them. And not just something copied from a greeting card that is all sentimental mush and dream-manifesting goo. I'm talking about a few words of honest insight. Who better than the commencement speaker? If she or he can capture the attention of the audience for a nano-second, some useful truths may be revealed.

Feel free to use my virtual speech as your own commencement speech template. Plagiarize without hesitation. I can't be everywhere, all the time, to dampen peoples' joy, so you go carry the torch in my stead. Be my little beacon of shattered illusions.

"Class of 200X…Parents, friends and faculty…we are gathered today to celebrate a milestone. Today, you young women and men of our community leave the shelter of our shared vision and move out to forge a vision of your own. Hopefully, you graduates can read. Ideally, you have some capacity for independent thought and ascribe even a little value to knowledge.

I am not the sort of speaker who will lull you into dreamy contemplation of your golden future, where you have fabulous financial and professional success, tremendous good fortune in love, and manage to have plenty of time and money left over to make a difference in the world. Unless you have completely withdrawn, even the least alert among you could not have failed to notice that there are rapids up ahead. Few of you come from ideal family situations - many of you understand that the adults in your lives have doubts and fears and faults. Some of you have already suffered from abuse or neglect and have very few hopes for yourself or your future. Several of you are self-medicating, having largely found life to be a confusing disappointment that you are attempting to counteract with chemicals of one kind or another.

Even if your entire youth has been one happy moment giving way to an even happier following moment (as if), you are aware that outside of your tiny, tiny cocoon, where you pupate, all snug and safe, most of the planet wakes up to find that they are not on the cover of People magazine. They are not glamorous; they are not wealthy or perfectly beautiful. They do not flit from one intriguing opportunity and romance to the next. They wake up each morning with simple survival on their minds, and their environment or their government or their economy or their countrymen or their geographical location or even microbes make their daily existence extremely challenging.

I do not tell you this to bring you down. You already know that we, the adults in your life, have been pretending that only good things are in store for you because your happiness (however elusive) is so important to us. We didn't want you to be too overwhelmed by reality, so we agreed to encourage you to march in the band even though there isn't much band-marching going on after high school. You may have scored the winning basket at Girls' Regionals, but so few women go on to play professional basketball that your time on the court playing in front of a cheering audience is now, effectively, over. Yes, you were almost always on the honor roll, but you know, there's a kid somewhere right now with a "C-" average and the personality of a rodent and he will be President of the United States thirty years down the road, not you.

We adults already knew all of this, but, until today, we thought it best to pretend otherwise and keep your spirits up. But, today, you are graduating and life as you know it is about to change radically. I am telling you all of this because 1) you are already, wisely, suspicious that we've all colluded to shield you from some obvious truths and 2) there is plenty of hopeful good news for you, but you have to see the world for what it is if you are going to make good use of your life.

So, one-two-three, eyes on me and take notes. There will be a test over this material. You won't be graded on it, but you will be taking the same test, every day for the rest of your life.

Q: Life is SOOOOOooo unfair. True or False?

A. True. Contrary to what you might have been told, cheaters often prosper and suffer few negative consequences. Many people go pretty far on their looks alone. Just being a male and exceptionally tall can be worth several hundred thousand dollars of earnings during the span of a career. Not every dog has its day - many people live a totally reprehensible life and die, self-satisfied and comfortable, in their sleep at an advanced age.

You are here to plant your own Garden, exclusively. You will drive yourself absolutely insane if you start feeling all discouraged that other people are reaping rewards from life without, seemingly, deserving them. It's true. They do. No help for it. Move on.

Q: Do I have a purpose in life?

A. The Buddha said that trying to assign meaning to your life is the path of madness. You can never know your true purpose, because it's subjective. The meaning you give your own experience is the meaning you choose for yourself out of your own sense of what is worthwhile. People who find material wealth meaningful, tend to pursue money. People who value intellect pursue education and are widely read. People who have a calling to become healers work as surgeons and therapists and acupuncturists. You will have to make your own meaning and you are likely to achieve this by following many different paths.

Choosing to live a life that reflects no meaning whatsoever is, also, making a choice. It just doesn't go anywhere. You aren't likely to get much personal satisfaction if you check the "no purpose" box on your test.

Q: What if I just want to party and have fun? What's wrong with that?

A. Nothing, really. The world, as a whole, doesn't care if you don't achieve anything. Partying is just not much of a challenge. Without challenging yourself, you don't grow as a person or have many informative experiences. Your life won't be very interesting for you or anyone else.

Of course, if you party irresponsibly, you become a menace to yourself and to society. You may end up in rehab or jail, which is SO not fun. If you keep it up as you get older, you will become rather pathetic to look at and your body will begin to deteriorate way ahead of schedule.

With the time and money that you spent getting loaded, staying loaded, going to rehab and paying all of your court fines, you could have done something far more interesting…you could have learned Italian at night classes and visited Venice. You could have bought a boat and sailed. You could have joined the Peace Corps and helped other people achieve a better standard of living.

It's your life to waste as you please, but give it some thought before you choose the road to nowhere.

Q. Can I achieve anything if I try hard enough?

A. No. That's just ridiculous. We are all constrained, to one extent or another, by talent, our family of origin, society, location, the marketplace, opportunity and timing. Professional sports favor certain body types and agility. International opera stars start off with a considerable amount of natural talent. Nobel winners in mathematics are, often, very good at math. If you are small and slow, can't carry a tune, and haven't a clue how to balance your checkbook, your aspirations to certain types of success in basketball, opera and mathematical theory are likely to be thwarted.

This isn't to say that you can't gain skill. If you love opera, you can study music. You can train. You can become an expert, a patron, a coach, a reviewer or a producer. You can become many things in the opera world if you have a passion and dedication to music, but you can't become an opera singer if you can't develop an exceptionally good singing voice. Don't despair. The old saying that every time a window closes, a door opens really applies here. If you start driving in the direction of opera, you will end up somewhere near opera. Life has a way of shaping your dreams as you go along and it adds to the element of surprise. This is a good thing, because your dreams grow as you grow. Trust me on this.

Q. Should I pursue security or follow my bliss?

A. This is a very sticky question. First off, your ideas of what constitutes your bliss might be pretty narrow given your limited high school experience. High schools like to keep you busy doing odd activities to boost your self-esteem and teach you to cooperate. Why else would you be required to run around a circular track really fast? I am here to tell you that in adult life, you hardly ever need to run very fast anywhere. Nor, will you have much call to twirl a baton or put out a yearbook. You may find bliss in running and twirling and you may have gotten the idea that your particular gifts are in some demand outside of high school. Sadly, this may turn out to be a false assumption.

Most of you will need to generate some sort of an income, and this will take up a good amount of time and energy. Ideally, your job and your bliss will coincide and you will reap enough financial rewards and personal satisfaction to keep this all in balance.

But the marketplace is not too devoted to your bliss. To support yourself, you usually have make or do something that the marketplace finds valuable. My best advice here is to take a cold, calculated assessment of what constitutes your bliss and try to shape it to an actual money-making enterprise. You will always be refining the balance between your desires and your opportunities. This is not only your challenge; it is true for almost everyone and you will be far, far happier knowing the truth of this before you devote yourself to a career pursuit that only exists in the abstract.

I don't mean to discourage you from your bliss; I only encourage you to be honest about your likely options. A friend of mine, a very gifted metal artist, went through years of effort and a rigorous MFA program to discover that the world wasn't paying cash for her tiny and intricate sculptures depicting political and social conflict. Teachers, distinguished artists and art critics admired her skill and she won many awards. But recognition of her talent didn't do much for covering her bills and she took work where she could find it. It took her a long time, I think, to recover from the disappointment that her art couldn't entirely support her life, and it wasn't from lack of dedication or talent.

Follow your bliss, by all means, but don't rely completely, as Joseph Campbell so famously suggested, for doors to magically open. It is true that passion has a power about it and all sorts of synchronous opportunities may arise, but this can be a bit too unpredictable when you need to pay your rent. Mr. Campbell grew up in a genteel family that could support him as he was dabbling about in his bliss. If you are not so fortunate, open yourself up to the larger realities of the marketplace as you devote yourself to ethnomusicology, or, whatever.

Q: But I'm special, right?

A. Well, no and yes. Of course, you're the moon and the sun and the stars to those who love you. And, true, there is only one you. You are unique. But even though no two snowflakes are alike, there are still a lot of snowflakes. There are around 6 billion of us on the planet, and only a few of us know how special you are. As a human, you are subject to most of the pain, pleasure, confusion and euphoria that other humans experience. You are likely to hate life and love life by turns.

Despite this anonymity, you actually have tremendous power to create and change the course of history. Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote a beautiful essay on this very topic called "We Were Made for These Times". "It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take 'everyone on Earth' to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for."

Q. Am I going to end up responsible for all of my choices and actions?

A. In science, you can often rely on predictable outcomes. At 7000 ft, if the standard barometric pressure is 23.088 inches Hg, water will boil at 199.3 ºF. If you drop a watermelon from a tenth floor balcony onto a concrete sidewalk below, it will result in a huge splat. Tequila will make you crazy. In life, cause and effect is not so clearly drawn. Your actions don't always have predictable consequences. You may reap something completely different from what you sow. But at the end of the day, when your head hits the pillow, you are what you do. Not what you think you are, or what you pretend to be, or your list of excuses, or what you say about yourself and your intentions. Your actions reflect who you are. The Wiccans have a philosophy that applies well here. They believe that whatever you send out into the world comes back to you threefold. If you go out into the world and act from a generous heart, you are likely to receive much kindness in return. Just showing up and being present for work, for friends, for school, for your animal companions and for your family is a huge act of merit and will, more than likely, bring you satisfying rewards. Be honest - you know the difference. Don't take what is not yours - you knew that someone else had been waiting for that parking space before you saw your opportunity and squeezed in ahead of her. Bullying, mistreating or manipulating other people to make yourself feel grander makes you a pitiable person. Not just a person with "self-esteem issues that you are working through"…just small, even if you get away with it for a long, long while.

Q. Does hard work pay off?

A. Well, it depends on what kind of pay-off you're hoping to realize. Some people work really hard (like farmers), but the rewards are uncertain. Other types of work are very demanding and, hopefully, rewarding, but are not traditionally big money makers (like teaching). Sometimes real satisfaction will come to you because you believe in the work you do, or you find it challenging, or it's just pleasant. A few types of work will suck your soul out of your body, but you'll make so much money that you will accept the trade-off willingly. There's no good answer to this question because there are so many variables. The best that can be said is that not making any effort almost certainly does not pay off, either financially or personally.

Q. Do I have to go to college?

A. Yes. You really should and here's why…never again will you be so free to pursue an education and absorb new ideas. Even if you can't see your way to attend a four year university full-time, take a few classes at a two year college before you decide that advanced education is not for you. You owe it to yourself to explore your potential before deciding on a course in life.

Here's my argument: your life experience will be a reflection of your capacity to understand and interpret it. The bigger your brain, the bigger your experience. Of course, plenty of people have huge smarts and never set a pinkie toe inside a college. But it's more of a struggle to educate yourself, and far easier to have other highly educated people show you the world. Think of it as a guided tour; you are free to travel on your own, but it's nice to have someone else make all of the arrangements.

Sure, the education you receive might be biased, limited and misguided (women other than Betsy Ross and Sacagawea didn't even get a mention in history books until about twenty years ago), but it will open up an important door in your mind that might otherwise remain closed. After you graduate, you can reject all you have learned and go on to teach yourself. But, by then, you'll be working with a more sophisticated brain that you came by a lot easier than if you had missed college all together.

If you weren't at the top of your high school class academically, don't be discouraged. Plenty of people shine in college even though they weren't sensational in high school. If you're unsure, take it very slow and choose courses that appeal to you rather than grinding through all freshman requirements at once. If you anticipate that certain courses are going to be really challenging for you, take them during the summer, carry a smaller course load or spread them out so that you won't be overwhelmed. Eventually, you will get the hang of college.

Q. I'm really smart. Won't that be enough?

A. Sadly, no. Intelligence is a gift, to be sure, but it's not the only gift, so don't get too comfortable. Intelligence without wisdom is akin to having a high-powered rifle, and no clue how to use it safely. To some extent, your intelligence is your genetic gift, but you have to rigorously pursue wisdom to become wise. You're Big Brain will benefit you only if you find something intriguing to do with it. And, for MENSA's sake, don't go around beating everyone else over the head with it. You're going to need friends to get through life, so be patient with people who straddle a few I.Q. points behind you. And, never forget that there are legions of brains ahead of you who can drop you in the dust. You'll need their charity as well.

Q. Are there secrets to life-long happiness?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know what they are?

A. I know one, for sure. We are all just passing through life; you aren't staying on the planet forever and you don't get to keep any of your stuff. Hold that thought.

Q. I have a lot of skills from gaming and role-playing. Can't I just stay in cyber-space?

A. A young friend explained to me recently that playing computer games enhanced all sorts of skills like reaction time. To support this, he pointed out that pilots train on simulated flight programs. My response was, "And then, the pilots go out and fly REAL planes in a REAL world. They don't join up with the Galactic Forces and fly destroyers from a battle station on Rigel XII."

While you're spending your 20s in virtual reality and vanquishing virtual foes, you are missing your life out here in normal reality. Sure, it can be painful and awkward. But if you are going to develop interpersonal skills, hot-air balloon over Tuscany when the sunflowers are in bloom, waltz, throw sticks for the terrier, bake a pie, scuba dive, read the masterpieces of literature, sleep on the airport floor in Papeete, Tahiti to save money, or stick your nose in a lilac bush and breathe in until you swoon, you have to shut off your monitor.

Above all, Class of 200X I encourage you to go out into the world and remain curious about your life. You will not find constant happiness or relentless ease. Everything you touch will not turn into gold. Even the most privileged of people suffer from loss and disappointment. Days will go this way and that, and no one can tell you a secret winning strategy for making life ideal.

But this world is made up of astonishing things. There are neutrinos and wallabies, Bhutan and the swimming cats of Lake Van, giant lily pads that you can walk across, pyramids, hula dancing and medicine, physics, architecture, dogs, film, romance, river rafting, ancient history, the moons of Jupiter, fractals, tree frogs, parasites, and mini-marshmallows. The variety of human experience is infinite. You can't possibly get bored - there's too much to entertain you and intrigue you everywhere you look.

You are on a unique journey. And I am not misusing the word "unique" to mean "unusual" or "rare"…I care that "unique" is preserved and only applied to that which is "singular" or "only one" (join me in my crusade whenever you can). You are the only person who will ever live the life ahead of you. Take your time. Go play in the Garden. Turn over the rocks and see what you can find. You were made for times such as these."

Notes-to-Self 2: And, look who graduated (again)! My prayers are for Matthew, who lured me into this, and passed away in March. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Susan and Tom, for their time and unflagging encouragement.

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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