Life-Anna Quindlen
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part
of the first. Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul
Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for re-election because he'd
been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I'd
spent more time in the office."
Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If
you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before
he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens
while you are busy making other plans."
You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else
has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there
will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you
will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your
particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your
life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your
mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to
write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a
winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten
back the test results and they're not so good.
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never
to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer
consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to
laugh.
I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean
what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would
be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I
call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I
try to laugh.
I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things
were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is
all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: get a life.
A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck,
the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if
you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a
breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red
tailed hawk circles over the water gap or the way a baby scowls with
concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first
finger.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love
you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.
Each time you look at your diploma, remember that you are still a student,
learning how to best treasure your connection to others. Pick up the phone.
Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad.
Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas in the
suburban neighborhood where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver
in a black, black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is the best
thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take
money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup
kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you
do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is
so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas, the sheen of the
limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids eyes, the way the melody in
a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.
It is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago.
Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life
in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all.
And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson
of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that
it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of
it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. And I tried to do
that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:
Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in
the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life
as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and
passion as it ought to be lived.
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I'll try to keep this in mind!!