Words To Live By (Mostly)

The New York Times published some excerpts here from graduation commencement speeches on Sunday June 15th, and though I should have gotten to it long before now, I’d like to bring you some excerpts that I thought were particularly good (something to think about as we head into the holiday weekend; I found them to be interesting and uplifting but for one rather obvious exception).

Gavin Newsom
Mayor of San Francisco
San Francisco State University

What is the secret of all success? Winston Churchill, he said it was moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm. ...Guys like Elvis Presley and Michael Jordan, Dr. Seuss, Henry Ford — if you don’t know him you probably drive one of his automobiles — all of them had failure in common.

Jordan was literally rejected from his high school basketball team. Michael Jordan wasn’t good enough. That guy Churchill finished last in his class. ... Henry Ford went bankrupt not once, not twice — three, four, five times went bankrupt. Dr. Seuss tried to publish that darn green eggs and whatever ham, not once — five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-three times he was rejected. Until a publisher finally said, "All right, what the heck do I have to lose?" And Elvis Presley got an F in music.

Bill Nye
Science educator
Harvey Mudd College

When you’re a little over six months into your 31st year, we will probably be over 12 billion — and on our way to 15 billion — humans on earth. Keep in mind also that half of the world’s people have never made a phone call. Their lives are agrarian and rural. Nevertheless, they know our culture and have seen what science and organized technology can do.

I’ve traveled a little, in India, China and Africa. People are walking less and driving more; we’re putting more cars on the road every week. Put roughly: if everyone on earth were to consume, drive, and especially use energy at the prodigious rate that each of us does here in the United States, we would need two more Earths. We don’t have two more Earths. We barely have one.

Clarence Thomas
Supreme Court justice
High Point University

I have no intention of cluttering up your graduation ceremony with ruminations about law, grievances or ephemeral commands on you to solve the world’s problems.

Most of us would do well to solve our own problems. Often, as most of us know, the real battle is conquering ourselves. But I do ask that you give me just a few brief minutes of your time on this most important day.

Let me first confess that I am no good at telling people what to think or how to live their lives. As those of us who take responsibility for our lives, and don’t blame others, know only so well, life has a way of humbling, if not humiliating us.

God, that man is pathetic. I’m soo sorry he continues to live with the burden of a Yale law degree. How about a little inspiration?

J. K. Rowling
Author
Harvard

By any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Richard Serra
Sculptor
Williams College

I have no problem with the virtual reality on your screens as long as you are aware that it is virtual. My concern is that experience by proxy is a poor substitute for the reality of the interactive space we inhabit.

As a sculptor I believe that perception structures thought and that to see is to think and conversely to think is to see.

The virtual reality of the media, be it television or Internet, limits our perception in that it affects our sense of space. It immobilizes our ability to apprehend actual physical space. Don’t let the rhetoric of simulation steal away the immediacy of your experience.

Keep it real, keep it in the moment. No one perceives anything alike; we only perceive as we are and it is our individual reality that counts.

Jessica Lange
Actress
Sarah Lawrence College

Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart — just to be present. Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, ultimately, your life is made up of moments. So don’t miss them by being lost in the past or anticipating the future.

Don’t be absent from your own life. You will find that life is not governed by will or intention. It is ultimately the collection of these sense memories stored in our nerves, built up in our cells. Simple things: A certain slant of light coming through a window on a winter’s afternoon. The sound of spring peepers at twilight. The taste of a strawberry still warm from the sun. Your child’s laughter. Your mother’s voice.

These are the things that shape our lives and settle into the fiber of our beings. Don’t take them for granted.

Amen.