Thank you Mr. Ball, Mr. Bland, students, teachers, family, members of the board of trustees. It is such a deep honor to address you today, on this day when we witness 180 students stand on the edge of the diving board and then jump off into the great wide world. I have to say, I was a little surprised when Mr. Bland called and asked me if I would be today’s speaker. In many ways, I am a very unlikely choice: while I was here, I won no awards; I was not top of the class; I was stuck somewhere in the middle. At my graduation, surrounded by so many of my talented classmates, I found myself wondering if I would ever really excel at anything, because it seemed like my own peculiar set of interests weren’t really the kind of interests that won awards. And indeed it would take me awhile, including several false starts, to figure out how to harness these interests into something that even resembled a profession. I did not take the obvious path: I ended up writing a novel about a genius twelve-year-old mapmaker. Yet the question still remains: Graduation speaker? Why me? And then Mr. Bland gently explained to me that I was actually not their first choice, that I was actually number seventeen on the list behind such luminaries as Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, and it all became clear. I was brought here to clean up. No, of course, I’m just kidding. I’m honored by your choice, senior class, and I’ll try not to let you down.
If all of those assembled today here don’t mind, I would like to address my talk directly to the graduating seniors. Everyone else may still listen in, (it’s okay—I give you my permission) but this talk is really for them. It’s their day.
There is an old zen koan which asks “How do you go straight ahead on a narrow mountain path which has ninety-three curves?” If life is this mountain path, then I am a bit further down the path than you, seniors, but not by much. Maybe like nine curves or something. Indeed, only thirteen years ago I was sitting in your exact spot, thinking exactly like you, when is this guy going to stop speaking so I can just get my fricking diploma already? I’m still figuring things out, now as I was then, as I will always be. In fact, right at this moment, I’m being even more reflective of the 93 curves than usual because—ta da—I’m getting married next week. And when you get married you ask a lot of big questions, like: “What do I value most in life?” and “What do I have to offer this other person who’s pretty awesome?” and “When will this person discover that my left armpit smells way worse than my right armpit?” So, since I am being reflective, I wanted to share three things that I have found helpful in my own journey through the 93 curves. Again, everyone else, you may listen in, but this is for you, seniors.
One of the reasons why addressing you on this day of days is such an utter privilege is that I know what a brilliant, diverse, engaged, curious bunch of people you are. I have talked to your teachers. I have talked to some of you. I have heard the stories. Graduations are so momentous not just because of what has been achieved today but because of the accumulation of what will be achieved in the future. Look around you, seniors. Your classmates will go on to study and unravel the human genome, to write novels and hilarious television shows, to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court, to find new and miraculous ways to keep the kitty litter inside the kitty litter box. We look at you, seniors, and we see a world that will change because of you. (No pressure or anything.)
But you graduate into an increasingly complex world in which you are constantly being bombarded with distractions, each piece of media begging for that last ounce of your precious attention. Over the course of my brief life, I have witnessed the rise of myriad technologies designed to simplify our lives, to entertain us, to bring us closer together. Email was just becoming popular when I first arrived at Milton. No one had a cellphone. Text messaging did not even exist. Now we send almost 5 billion text messages to each other every single day. I am not going to be one those people who stands up here and says, “I remember when we used to write letters and everyone spoke like Abraham Lincoln and soda cost a nickel.” No, I’m not going to do this because soda did not cost a nickel and this kind of nostalgic handwringing gets us nowhere. But what I will say is that Milton has done an amazing job of preparing you for this world of media saturation because it has taught you what I believe to be the single most critical skill one can have in life: the ability to listen. You were lucky enough to have great teachers here—teachers like Mr. H—and great teachers are defined by their ability to listen, react, adjust, respond to their students. Teachers are hero listeners. But in this world, even the ability to listen to others is not enough. Milton has given you something even more important, even more intimate than this: the ability to listen to one’s self. To reflect on one’s work, to wonder, to compare options, and to settle on what you need to do next. This kind of reflection is at the heart of all good work, be it professional, personal, or spiritual. As Saint Francis of Assisi says, “What we are looking for is what is looking.” And this takes time to look at the looker. It takes quiet time. Reflection doesn’t work like a game of Angry Birds--in short two minute bursts while you wait in line at the snack bar. And reflection does not just happen spontaneously, like a sneeze, although sometimes we desperately wish it did. You have to build in time for it. Reflective time is active time.
For example, in my own life, a life in which I attempt to conjure novels about things I know little to nothing about such as growing up in Colonial Cambodia or surviving WWII in arctic Norway, I spend my mornings writing, sitting in my chair for hours. There are no secrets to writing novels, only time and persistence and a little more time. And while showing up each day is important, I believe the most critical part of my day isn’t even the time I spend in the chair. It is in the afternoon, after I leave my office. Everyday I go on a jog or sometimes a walk with my dog through the woods. I try not to bring along my headphones. I reach for them, but then I put them away. This is because I want to leave room for my brain to marinate on what I’ve just written. And as I walk though the woods, I start to make these connections between previously disparate ideas and I begin to realize what it was I was trying to write in the first place. But this process cannot be rushed. We all know that feeling of sitting down to write a paper and not knowing what it is we’re trying to say. Well, figuring out what you want to say takes time. As our lives fill up with business, with texting and twittering and commentary about the commentary, the first things to go are these subtle moments of reflective quiet, because their fruits are often not apparent in the short term. But they are critical. So this is my first piece of advice: keep listening, leave room for the quiet. Take a walk each day and study the curves in the path.
The whole “walk a day” thing, however, might prove a little tricky because your lives are about to change drastically: many of you are off to college in the fall. Some of you are wisely taking a year off to go find yourself, and some of you are building a high tech flying suit of metal so as to fight crime and flirt with Gwyneth Paltrow. Hold on...what? Oh, that was the movie I just saw last night... Anyway, I am excited for all of you. Freshman year in college is an amazing, eye-opening, very busy time, a time of realizing the only really important rules are the ones that you set for yourself. Many of you have already made some plans of what you want to study in college. And this is all fine & dandy. We like plans. But don’t plan too hard. Leave room to be surprised. This is a good rule of thumb.
I want to tell you a little story about my own freshman year at Brown. My roommate—we’ll call him Peter to protect his identity—was quite different than I was. He was what you might call a “nerd.” Not that I wasn’t a nerd. I was pretty nerdy, but I’d come out of Milton, where nerds are allowed to thrive and blossom and play the harp. I’d been in a Pixies cover band. I’d had long hair. I was on the Arts Board. I was a nerd but I was an “artsy nerd,” and in the great nerd taxonomy, these are some of the most powerful nerds. Peter was not an artsy nerd. Peter was a nerd’s nerd. Peter comes into Brown freshman year convinced he was going to be a Bio Chemist. It was already decided. He signed up for organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry and genetics and all these heavy duty science courses. And a part of me deeply admired him for knowing exactly what he wanted to do, particularly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. But I did notice some interesting behaviors from our friend Peter. For instance, he would stay up late playing Final Fantasy on his Playstation, which, as far as I could tell, is a video game where you walk around castles and fight people with a sword that is bigger than your body. He would IM his friends all night long and I remember the cacophonous sound of his space bar, marking the beat of his typing—my God that space bar sounded like it was attached to a stick of dynamite. On more than one occasion I wanted to throw his computer out the window. But I didn’t. Instead, I once asked him what all this late-night IMing was about and he said “I don’t know. Castles.” And I was like “Okay.” But in my head I was thinking “Castles? Who IMs about castles at 3 in the morning?” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like castles as much as the next guy. But Peter really liked castles. Peter also had a giant glass bowl in the middle of his desk that he liked to stare at for long periods of time. On one occasion that fall, I had some “ladies” over to watch a film. I was trying to impress them. I switched off the lights, the ladies were excited and then I went to turn on the television. In the pitch black, on my way to the TV, I encountered some strange resistance. I ignored this, tried to keep walking, and all at once there was this tremendous crash. Okay, I thought to myself, that’s strange, I don’t hear that everyday, but I guess I’ll just keep walking to the TV. Except each time I tried to take a step forwards, I heard more smashing noises. It was only then that I realized I had walked right into our telephone cord, which had pulled the telephone and Peter’s prized bowl off of his desk and onto the floor. And now, with each step I tried to take, I was essentially slamming and re-slamming the bowl with the phone. I mean, I was just pounding the thing. Eventually I figured out what was going on and I turned on the lights, deeply embarrassed in front of all these ladies. And at that precise moment, Peter walked in. I will never forget the expression on his face. Needless to say, I felt like a very bad person. I think I spent the rest of the semester apologizing. And he spent the rest of the semester painstakingly reassembling the bowl, piece by piece, like some kind of archaeologist. (Yeah, I’m a jerk.)
So fast forward to spring of sophomore year. [make the fast forward gesture with hands] We’re no longer roommates, but I run into Peter at Spring weekend. I hadn’t seen him all year. And you know what he says? He tells me that he’s switched his major from Bio Chemisty to French Medieval History. And guess what? That summer he’s going on an archeological dig in Brittany.
“So you’ll get to hang out in castles?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Peter said longingly. “Castles...”
Peter’s not alone. History is peppered with people who started life going in one direction only to switch course and end up heading in a completely different tack. Sam Adams was an unsuccessful business man and part-time beer brewer before something caught fire inside of him and he helped to lead the American revolution. Joseph Conrad was a sailor adrift on the sea before he wrote all those wicked sweet novels in his fourth language. Samuel Morse was a struggling painter before he invented the telegraph machine, an auditory device which would collapse space and time and change the way that we communicate forever.
The point is, while hopes can be good, expectations will almost always disappoint us. My motto is: don’t expect too much and then be pleasantly surprised when things work out. And really leave room to be surprised by the 93 curves, because life is most certainly not going to go as you planned it. Stay open to this. When something comes along, and the buzzer goes off inside of you, even if this thing is castles or goat-herding or particle physics—go for it. Take that class that you are interested in but does not quite fit in your life’s plan. Who knows. It could end up being your life.
Finally, seniors, I want you to take a second and look up and down your row. Notice the people you know, the people you don’t know so well. Beyond the academic skills you have gotten from this place—this, these people are the greatest gift that Milton is giving you. These people in this community are going to be some of the most amazing people you will ever meet, now and forever. Next week when I get married, three of my five groomsmen will be from Milton Academy, class of ’98. And not only that, the guy who is marrying us, our officiant, is Ryan Harvey, also class of ’98. Except the funny thing is that while Ryan and I went to Milton together, and went to Brown together, and both took a semester in South Africa, it wasn’t until after college that we really became friends. Friendships, like life, can take years to develop and unfold, blossoming only when the time is right. Just think: the person sitting next to you, the person you barely know, could be the person who ends up officiating your wedding thirteen years from now. Maybe it begins today. It begins when you reach across the aisle and say to them, “Um, will you officiate my wedding? Maybe in like... thirteen years?”
Your classmates are such an amazing and essential gift, it can be easy to overlook their presence in your life. And my last piece of advice is this: don’t take them for granted. Too often we wait for something tragic to occur before we show people how important they are to us. I want to tell you a story that I have never before told in public. But I thought it would be right today because I feel so warmly towards this place and also because I understand that you all have been through several tragedies of your own this year.
Shortly after college, I had moved to Brooklyn, unsure of what would happen next, ready to see what the world would throw at me. On a cold, clear afternoon in December, I went ice skating at a rink in Prospect Park. It was just after one pm. I was walking back to my car, skates over the shoulder, when four kids came up behind me and swung a bat at my head, completely shattering my face and cracking my skull. They took my money, acted tough, and then ran away, unaware of the karmic implication of their actions. Miraculously, I did not lose consciousness, but managed to stumble back to the skating rink. From there I was rushed to a trauma ward, and then to another hospital, where two days later one of the top surgeons in the country agreed to put off his Christmas vacation and operate on me. It was an eleven hour surgery. My forehead was in seventy six pieces. Amazingly, they found all the pieces, reassembled them on the operating table using glue and metal plates and then put them back into my head. My orbitals, the bones around my eyes, were pulverized, so they shaved part of my skull off and made me new ones. They bolted my nose back into place using sixteen screws. It was complicated stuff, but everything that could go right, did go right, save perhaps that initial swing of the bat. People say to me, “Oh, but you are so unlucky to be attacked like that in broad daylight” and I say to them, “You have no idea how lucky I am.” This is the overwhelming feeling I had at the time and still feel today. How utterly lucky I am to be alive. But my real sense of luck comes from the incredible, incredible outpouring of support that all of my friends and family showed at the time. It was amazing. I felt like I was resting upon this great balloon of love. It is a feeling I will never forget. My friends’ compassion was so palpable, so completely generous, that it made my recovery—both the short-term physical recovery and the long-term emotional recovery—possible and even joyful. We are so, so very lucky to have these people in our lives. So what I am here to say is, don’t wait. This love and appreciation for those around us exists now and it will exist always, but sometimes we forget to express it. And it can be a very simple thing to express. A note. A handshake. A text. The point is: don’t wait. Don’t wait. Don’t wait.
So that’s it. That’s all I got. Stay quiet, keep listening, embrace and thrive off of the unexpected, and don’t wait to tell those people you know and love how you feel about them. That’s about it. The rest I’ll tell you after I get married next week.
Congratulations Class of 2011. Good luck with the 93 curves. I know you will all bring down the house.
[Back to Graduation 2011]
