I wish that I had writing skills...sadly I don't...but what I do have is a passion for things that are written well and I can find them and keep in my possession until I feel compelled to share them. I am sorry...this is a bit long...but worth the time to read...especially with a brand new year ahead of us.
Happy New Year!!!
Robin
The following is a
commencement address to the graduating class
at Villanova University by author Anna
Quindlen. It came to me in an
email newsletter and I was so moved by its message that I'm passing it on
to everyone I possibly can - It's so very appropriate. particularly as we begin a new year.
"It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great-Uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce. I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.
"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 had 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 his 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
to 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 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 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. 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 our kids' eyes, the way the melody i
n a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy
to exist instead of living. 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, 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. Well, you can learn all
those things, out there, if you get a real life, a full life, a professional life,yes, but another life, too, a life of love and laughs and a connection
to other human beings. Just keep your eyes and ears open.
"Here you
could learn in the classroom. There the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes
at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more
time at the office.
"I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at
Coney Island maybe 15years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the
homeless survive in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the
wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about
his schedule, panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone,sleeping in a church when the temperature went to freezing, hiding from
the police amidst the Tilt or Whirl or some other seasonal ride."He told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing
the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had
to wear his newspapers after he read them. "And I asked him why. Why didn't
he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the
hospital for a detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, 'Look at
the view,young lady. Look at the view."
And every day, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to
look at the view. And that's the last thing I have to tell you today, words
of wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere
to be.
"Look at the view. You'll never be disappointed."
