Last night I had the privilege of giving the commencement address at my school’s graduation. As I am leaving to start my graduate studies, it was an emotional and profound opportunity for me. And hey, I didn’t puke all over myself, so I put it in the win column.
Here’s the video, in which I look like a celestial ball of light.
If you don’t have the patience to sit through a 20 minute video, or you just hate the sound of my voice as much as I do, here’s a transcript. There are some minor discrepancies between the text and the actual speech, but the core is the same.
Speech
Welcome, everyone, to Graduation 2014. Welcome to all you parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, optometrists, bookies, barber-surgeons, cryptozoologists, and anyone else who has helped get our students here. Welcome to the TSAS faculty, staff, and administration. And last but not least, welcome to those people without whom we could not call this a graduation: I’m speaking of course of all those of you who brought your air horns with you tonight. Oh, and…
To the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences, Class of Two thousand and fourteen: WELCOME!
If you ever find yourself in my position, giving a commencement address, you may want to do some research into the phenomenon. Like I did, you will quickly discover that the art of the commencement speech, a lore passed down through the ages, largely consists of saying the same thing over and over again for ten minutes, with slight variations. So I thought and thought over what I wanted to say to you, our graduates, before you go out these doors and into the next stage of life. I thought about something inspirational and clichéd, like “If you get the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.” But then I remembered my time chaperoning this year’s prom, and I can safely say to you PLEASE, for all our sakes, if the choice is presented to you, sit it out. Don’t dance.
Instead, what I want to say to you tonight was perhaps best summed up by Bill Watterson, creator of the greatest comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes. When that strip came to a close, Watterson ended it with a large Sunday panel. Calvin looks out on a fresh white snow fall, sled in hand, his faithful tiger companion at his side, and says “It’s a magical world, Hobbes old buddy… Let’s go exploring.” For all we know they stand there to this day, ever exploring. These, then, are my words to you tonight: Let’s go exploring!
The idea of life as a journey of exploration is, of course, its own cliché, utilized as a cheap shortcut to denote the struggles of human existence. But it’s a cliché that burrows down so deep to the heart of who we are that it transcends cliché, to the point where it says something profound about who we are as a species.
Those of you who have been at TSAS since your freshman year have already encountered this call to adventure, whether you have known it or not. The very first book we read with you in World Studies, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is the story of a quest, an exploration of mankind’s limits in the world we inhabit. After Gilgamesh you read with us The Odyssey, the ultimate story of a man sentenced to journey.
It should be no surprise that these, our oldest stories, touch on the idea of life as a journey of exploration. For humankind itself partakes on a sort of journey, a pilgrimage to find its place in the order of the universe. So too do we each reenact this journey in our own lives. Some navigate it skillfully, some seem to stumble drunkenly from outpost to outpost, but all of us play-act this Odyssey of what it means to be human. Though I am far from the most agile pilgrim you could hope to meet, I want to give you a few words to speed you on your journey as we part ways.
First, and most important: don’t stay at home. This is obvious, of course, and most of you by now are chomping at the bit to escape the confines of your houses. Many of your parents are by now ready to toss you out on your rears. But this is not what I am speaking of. The staying at home I warn you against is of a much more sinister and hidden nature. Some people are able to spend their lives trekking across the physical globe, but in their hearts have never left the couch in their parent’s basement. Don’t be those people. Don’t be so wowed by what sits right in front of your face that you neglect the adventure that lies beyond the confines of your own nose. Don’t be so self involved that you wrap yourself in the attic of your own mind, imprisoned behind a wall of ego and vain desire.
It is a great irony of the world we inhabit that as we push technologically toward a world without borders, we encase ourselves ever more tightly in protective bubbles of taste and preference. More and more we are taught to just trust our instincts and tastes, never questioning whether perhaps – just perhaps – our tastes are in need of molding and guidance. And so too often we stick with what seems safe and comforting at the expense of the experiences which will challenge and threaten us.
Outside of the Odyssey, my favorite presentation of the character of Odysseus comes in a poem by the English poet Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, who calls the seafarer by his Roman name, Ulysses. Tennyson’s poem of that name checks in on Ulysses as he sits by the fire in Ithaca, an old man whose experiences around the Mediterranean reside only in the memory. But Ulysses has never succumbed to the idleness of spirit that tempts us all: he remains restless for new adventure. At the end of the poem he cries out to his fellow sailors for one last voyage:
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
These words have always spoken to me. Though old and feeble, Odysseus refuses to yield to sloth. He says earlier that he is “always roaming with a hungry heart.” That is what I wish for you: that you would roam the seas of human experience with a hungry heart, devouring life as you encounter it.
That is why I wish on you a burning desire to encounter the best things humankind has yet produced. I hope on each and every one of you the wild, restless spirit that will lead you to do things others will scoff at. While others around you barely read the backs of cereal boxes, I hope you read the really hard books that will transform you: Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fear and Trembling. While others around you only make it to the multiplex for the occasional showing of Captain America 10: What’s Cappnin’, I hope you seek out masters of film like Kurosawa, Coppola, and Herzog. While your friends quake at the thought of any song longer than five minutes, I hope you really freak them out by making them sit through a Mahler symphony, or a Mozart opera. Seek out the greats because the greats refuse to allow us to remain small.
Taking a stand for the good in a world that values only the safe entails certain sacrifices. If you take my heed and truly leave home, you will be marked out. There is even a sense in which you must yourself reject those around you when they inhibit your journey. And so I say to you, secondly, go it alone.
This is the part of my speech that gets uncomfortable as I tell you a sobering fact: most of the people sitting to your right and left will not be a significant part of your life going forward. We all look forward as we leave high school to escaping the presence of those we find odious – the guy who laughs too loud at his own jokes or the girl who never closes her mouth to chew. But even those you consider close friends will most likely leave you to your own devices as they go off chasing whatever strand of this human journey belongs to them. You’ll see them occasionally and it will be awkward with the awkwardness of stumbling upon old poetry you wrote when you were much younger and stupider. You’ll follow them on Facebook and be appalled at their life choices and political convictions.
This is when you’ll want to heed the advice of old Marcus Aurelius, who knew a thing or two about living. That great Emperor of Rome taught that to be content requires only access to and control over your innermost being. As friends abandon you or drift away you may find yourself like Odysseus, alone on a raft of isolation, with only your wits and inner strength to save you. Then may you heed Marcus’ words: “Seek not external help nor the tranquility which others give. A man then must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.”
For this, as for so many things in my life, I look to my mother for an example. The child of missionaries, born in Cameroon in West Africa, she lived a life filled with travel. Between eighth grade and her second year of college, she was at a different school every year, in six countries on three different continents. Though her pace slowed a bit as she grew older, she later spent a decade in the wilds of Australia, a decade in the relative calm of Michigan, and the last years of her life in another backwater dumping ground for criminals: the state of Florida. Through all this my mother retained a firm knowledge of who she was and what path she walked down. By staying anchored to the ideas and words which shaped who she was, she became an example to many of how to live contentedly no matter where she found herself.
Even as I give you these hard and necessary words, there is a secret hope behind them; a hope that you will pass through aloneness intact and discover something better beyond it: true friendship. And so I say to you, third of all: don’t go it alone.
Aristotle famously declared that man is a political animal. By this he did not mean that we as a species relentlessly form useless factions to try to gain power – though we’re awfully good at that – but that we tirelessly seek out society, the mutually beneficial company of other humans. As important as solitude is, it forms only a part of our journey, for to travel ever on our own robs us of what makes us uniquely human.
Frederick Buechner, one of America’s greatest living writers, said this in his astounding memoir The Sacred Journey:
To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do – to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst – is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.
Hopefully most of you dream of finding your place in the world, but what good does it do to reach that destination with no one by your side? It’s not just loneliness I’m warning against: isolating yourself from others repudiates the very essence of being human. Wherever these deep desires come from, one thing is sure: humankind is meant for community, for gathering around bread and salt and drink and song till our hostilities dissolve and we achieve connection with those around us.
How can this deep connection exist, if most of those we meet along this journey of life pass in and out of our existence as quickly as birds flitting across our field of vision? It’s a bitter riddle: why make bosom companions only to leave them? I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question, but I have hints and guesses – hints followed by guesses, as TS Eliot would say. I find again a shadow of an answer in my mother’s life. Despite her great inner strength – or perhaps because of it – my mother was able to connect deeply with those she met around the world. In the last year of her life, as she made that final journey into Hamlet’s undiscovered country, she was blessed with strength from companions who came to see her because she had in some way touched them deeply. People from all phases and locales of her life made journeys to help her with her journey: from Michigan, from Australia, from Cameroon, even from Cleveland, Ohio where she spent only a single year in high school.
“I am a part of all that I have met”, Ulysses says in Tennyson’s poem. That’s the key, I think: to be so much ourselves that we absorb humanity from others and give it out freely without losing our own selves. We must accept others as they come to us, but be ready to let them go when the time comes.
If you stop to think of it, you have an incredible example of that in your life: these past years spent at TSAS with the most caring faculty you could hope for. What has amazed me as I’ve worked here, time and again, is the sacrificial commitment of this faculty. It extends even beyond just helping with school work to participating in the real messiness of life. One of my favorite verses in the Bible comes from St. Paul, who when writing to the Thesselonians said this: “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the good news but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.” That’s what sets these amazing teachers apart. They share not just the parts of them that touch on their subjects, but the secret, hidden parts of who they really are. I think of Okapal staying all hours after school to play board games, or Mrs. Hughes sacrificing every second of her spare time to help the 10,000 clubs she runs, or Mrs. Ingram sharing her words of wisdom, or Ellen cooking up boatloads of food for students. I think of our dear friend Roddy, who would arrive at school early to run a capella practices because he wanted boys to know the joy of singing. There are hundreds more examples; each teacher here gives of themselves every day, then watches you head out after four years. Hard as it is to have the constant ebb and flow of students in our lives, it’s enough, I think, to have had those moments of sacrifice and connection.
The need for the foolish miracle of human connection points the way to another, grander bit of folly, which is that all of our journeys of exploration point back, in the long run, to the places from which we come. Therefore I say to you, last of all: find your way home.
In his poem Little Gidding, from his epic tetralogy The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot writes this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-treeNot known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
What Eliot is telling us here is essential. The human journey of exploration has one thing only as its focus: to return to the places we have traveled and finally understand them. Our exploration has but one true north at which it aims: home. Like Odysseus we spend our lives wandering, till the idea of home exists only as a mirage. But this vision, however faint, cannot be erased: we strive after the meaning of our lives, only to discover it in the place we started from. Gilgamesh ends where it begins, with a description of the city built by its great hero. The Odyssey at its close finds Odysseus, come through storms and imprisonments intact, resting in the love of his family. My own mother, after years of wandering, came home a complete person, as we buried her ashes in Cameroon. May we too come to rest in the completion we find in the pain and joy of our own human journeys.
That’s the rub: you cannot find home by staying there. Only by leaving can you return with opened eyes, with human hope that cannot be taken from you. You are – we are, all of us – stepping out on a tiny leg of our journeys. After tonight we part – you going your way, I going mine – and who knows when we will meet again? It is sad, of course, to part, but I rest in the knowledge that all of you hold within yourselves the ability to journey well, to someday become human. I leave you then, not with a goodbye, but with a Godspeed from, naturally, T.S. Eliot again. In the third of his Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages, he writes:
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left the station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think ‘the past is finished’
Or ‘the future is before us’.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark,
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind…Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
TSAS class of 2014, I say to you, then: Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.
