This is well worth the 18 minutes to watch. I wished this had been my commencement speech when I graduated UGA back in 1998.
We are in the season of graduations and commencement speeches. The one above is one of the best I’ve heard this season. His advice on the six strings is wise words and would resonate with me beyond the ceremony. I have to say most of the ones I’ve heard in my time don’t resonate.
The world breaks everyone. Afterward, the best of us are stronger at the broken places.
Amen.
Life isn’t fair. I can’t argue with that, it’s as true today as it’s ever been. We try to tiptoe through the garden and avoid the nasty things but life has a way of shoving them in your face and making you deal with it. Many of your here are lawdawgs, and you know as well as anyone that life is cruel, ugly, and without remorse. And often…unfair. If you’ve been an EMT or a first responder, you’ve seen this in grotesque ways. I only asked to be a humble educator, but in my time in administration, I’ve seen more public horrors and nauseating things than I care to recount.
That’s life.
If I had to go back to my younger self, sitting there at a commencement speech, and had to look at younger me and give me a piece of advice as a commencement, it’d be this, from Hunter S. Thompson:
You bought the ticket, now take the ride.
As soon as I made a conscious choice to be a committed, rational, and educated person, I likewise chose, unconsciously, to realize that life is illogical, people are crazy, and I won’t be able to see eye to eye with that. Like Church said above, my resilience would wear thin. The community will sand down your edges and you’ll slowly become a dull version of what you are today.
The truth, though, is that resilience comes from our response to things, not from the things themselves. And folks, you’re not always going to win. You’re not always going to succeed. Failure is as much a part of life as winning, and the failure makes you love the win even more. Somehow, as a younger version of myself, I thought because I followed the rule, I’d end up on the up side of life.
As Anton Chigurh said in No Country For Old Men, “if the rule you followed brought you to here, of what use was the rule?”
My advice to my younger self would be when you find yourself in a place where you never expected to be and facing things you never asked for, you have a few choices:
- Stay where you’re at, and accept the consequences that come as a result of freezing.
- Fight where you’re at, and enjoy the rewards you reap when you went to seizing, even if they weren’t the intended rewards.
- Be defeated where you’re at, and set your self to people pleasing. And don’t be surprised when you realize it’s not you you’re pleasing.
In that case, there’s really only way. Fight. And if you never thought you’d be a fighter, start telling yourself that you are. Because if you aim to make everyone else happy, the one guarantee in life is the one person who won’t be happy, will be you.
So, for today’s Fodder…what bit of advice do you wish you could give your younger self that you’ve had to learn the hard way? What would’ve resonated with your 18 or 22 year old self as a commencement message?
Discuss.