Dear Seniors,
If I knew at high school graduation what I know now, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t know if this will resonate beyond one reading, or if it will resonate at all, but after eight years of farewells to seniors, this year I feel compelled to write, to send you off with some advice. Maybe this is just some cosmic timing in my life; maybe it’s being a parent; maybe it’s both or neither. And while I don’t know very much more now, at 35, than I did when I was 18, I still feel compelled to speak up. So, here’s my one rule for a good life.
- Life is long. While that might sound like the antithesis of The Motto (YOLO), it is in the same vein: your life is statistically going to be longer than most others in human history. This is a huge responsibility. Life is long means you have time to make mistakes, so permit yourself freedom to fail. Life is long also means that the daily work of not being caught up in nonsense, of seeing the big picture and aiming always towards happiness or contentment or peace is going to be something you continually work at. For me, that has been the hardest part of living: knowing that every day is one of thousands I will experience and still not thinking of each day, each moment, as special. A quick note on Moments, by the way: there are moments, like graduation, that are orchestrated. A lot of people go through a lot of trouble to make a graduation happen, and I’m not only talking about day-of logistics, but also the extensive list of people and their lives that have been bent towards getting you to this point, by which I mean bus drivers and custodians and vending machine suppliers and transportation repairmen and light rail engineers, plus of course parents, siblings, friends and the whole of human history whose backs upon which we all sit today (especially if you are reading this on a “smart” device). There are going to be other moments in your life that don’t seem to matter. There will be the blackout rides to work, where you put on your seat-belt and your sunglasses and then, without seeming to know how it happened, you are undoing that seat-belt and stepping into a parking lot without entirely being sure of how you got there. This can happen in college, too. It’s called complacency. For some of us, complacency is the goal. I became a teacher because it was the steadiest work I could think of: you literally can’t get fired without doing something terrible. The problem with steady is that it can get boring. And, yes, I’m telling you that I’ve been bored at my job. This is probably a shock to those of you who still believe your teachers only exist in the schools, that we like elves who live only in the rooms where you see us daily. I’m sorry: we go home, sometimes. We go home and we vent about you on the bad days. But, to the point: we also go home and say nothing on most days. On these ordinary days, when everything went according to plan, we don’t talk about our day. And that’s the inevitable conflict: we want things to go according to plan, so much so that some of us get addicted to planning. College is wonderfully predictable: professors usually show up. Parties usually happen. People are usually decent and friendly and bonds can happen seemingly spontaneously and you’ll instinctively cultivate that bond for years. Then graduation (Moment) and then First Job (Moment-ish) and then what? I’m not saying that life after college is boring. I’m saying that it’s no more boring than what you’ve already faced. Especially at a school like ours, you know that kind of stressful boredom, where there seem to be one million things happening and yet you feel like nothing ever happens. Maybe that’s just a millenial thing, maybe it’s more universal. Either way: if that kind of stress-boredom got to you in high school, it’s going to get to you in college and again as an adult. And, like I said, life is long. And I hope that scares you a lot right now, because it should. Because you shouldn’t accept perpetual stress, nor should you accept perpetual boredom. Real happiness, the cliche goes, comes from within. That means your inner life has to be rich and has to be acted upon the world around you. It means you have to exert your will on the world as you, individually, experience it. That doesn’t mean be a bully or bullish. It means be at peace and be a force for peace. Less abstractly, that means your life is going to be filled with millions of moments that you can either sleep through, like your commute to work, or that you can absolutely be invested in, like this moment now. The beauty of the Orchestrated Moments is that they remind us that life beyond them is a series of chaotic, random moments. And, of course, these big moments also suffer from the dullness of reality: it is very likely that your big-hearted imaginings as a freshmen had this moment filled with RomCom music and sentiments and yet, here you are, itching under your robes. We are the ones who sculpt our experiences into stories and then meanings about life when we need them. The more we are blind, the less meaning our lives will seem to have. So, stay awake. Seek the moment, however subtle. Seek change, however far off or beyond your control that change might seem. Don’t let beauty go unremarked upon, don’t allow fools to gain power, and don’t ever ever ever forget that good is Good and Good is Big and you want to be Big. Be the Biggest you can for as long as you can. And that’ll be enough.
All my love,
MD
Diamond Has Class 