Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Thursday, June 14, 2007 7:57:15 AM
June 14, 2007 -- I am happy to stand before y'all today secure in the knowledge that the security people have shaken you down and removed all your electronic Binkies, so for the next ten minutes I will have that part of your attention not engaged in blabbering to your neighbours. I can't require you to shut up; your mothers never taught you that skill. But I can remind you that God gave you two ears and one mouth so you can listen twice as often as you talk, and this is a time to listen. Because when you leave your dorm room or apartment with TheGuys for the last time today, you will be entering a world that doesn't give a rat's patootie about you.
For all your life until now, you have been told by everyone from your adoring Mommy to the professors and minders at school that you are special. Tomorrow you will find out you are not; in point of fact, tomorrow you will not only not be special, you will be invisible. Far from having a hand to hold, you will be on a plank footbridge in a hurricane. Nobody will hear you hollering for rescue. The hurricane doesn't care about you; it doesn't care if you hang on or if you let go. Neither does Life. Once you leave the safety of the campus, you are on your own.
You are looking at me and thinking that I am older than your grandmother and I don't know anything about YOUR world, that tomorrow you will step out of your dorm room into an apartment like the one on Friends and a job as a network anchorperson or an NBA basketball star, and it won't matter that you can't even change the toilet roll or that you don't understand that toilet paper doesn't grow there. I'm here to tell you that tomorrow you will be homeless and unemployed, and most of you have far less marketable skill than you think you have, and half of you will end up working at Borders or Starbucks. And if you think you can afford an apartment like Friends on what will be left when the taxes are removed from that paycheque, think again.
The other shock you have coming to you is that you have to go to your job every day, whether you want to or not, and you don't get summers off. In fact, you won't get any vacation at all unless your boss (who IS the boss of you) says you can have it, and when you do get time off, you won't be able to afford to go anywhere. Remember those college loans? Even though you majored in rock and roll or Gender Studies or some other equally useless nonsense, and you find that you're unqualified for real work, you have to pay that money back. And if that means getting a night job cleaning offices in addition to the day job at Starbucks, so be it. From now on everything you do is going to be aimed at not letting that hurricane wash you off that plank footbridge, and likely it will be that way for the next five years. And every day when you get up, what that day contains is wholly up to you. Nobody is going to phone you and tell you to come to work; if you don't come to work you will lose your job. For most of you, nothing you do will be 'meaningful' and even those who majored in useful subjects will find that work is drudgery for that first five years while you learn how to cope with that hurricane.
The point to remember is that it is all up to you from now on and the world doesn't care if you fail. If you get washed off that footbridge, the world will continue to turn.
Now for the good part. From now on there's nobody in the world who has the right to tell you how to make your way off that footbridge. If you want to strap on your backpack and travel through the world, working at menial jobs to keep body and soul together and learning foreign languages and customs on the fly, being fleeced by people with 'special deals' and catching parasites and diseases you never heard of until you have them, you can do it. If you want to join the Army, the Peace Corps, the Salvation Army or the priesthood, go for it. In fact, if you want to squat on a street corner with a tin cup and sleep in the park, nobody will say you nay. You are the boss of you. Until you voluntarily put yourself under the command of a higher boss, not a one of us has the right to tell you which direction to go. But with that freedom comes responsibility. You are still responsible for those college loans; you still have to eat and sleep and dress and transport yourself; you still need medical care and likely you need friends. It's up to you and nobody else to take care of those needs.
And the biggest shock of all is coming to you when you realize that Mommy and Daddy worked for 40 years to get the life you took for granted -- and just like happened to them, life is not going to hand it to you.
My Daddy did not graduate from high school; instead he worked on the family farm until he went off to World War II. But he taught me a few things that enabled me to make my way off that footbridge and out of the hurricane without being washed away. The first thing was that the world may be round like an orange, but that orange does not belong to anybody -- and if you aren't quick, you'll be lucky to be left with a piece of orange peel for your share. The second thing is that Popularity is a waste of time unless you are running for Miss Universe. The world is a big place and 90% of the people in it have never heard of you, and of the 10% who have, 85% of those people will hate you no matter what you do. Forget it and move on. And the third thing is that when you get off that footbridge and out of the hurricane, the satisfaction you will feel is the biggest high you will ever know. It doesn't matter to Life how you accomplish that feat; it doesn't matter to Life if you accomplish it at all.
What matters is you, looking back at that footbridge lashed by the storm and seeing the people still making their way and some of them being washed away, and knowing you have made the journey and you didn't get beat.
Men and women of the graduating class of 2007, prepare yourself for the anonymous epic battle of your life, and prepare to do it alone. You will look back on that adventure when you're my age and marvel at the depths you had in you that you never suspected until Life kicked you out onto that plank footbridge in that storm.
Go and enjoy the battle.