The Graduates

Considering how to embrace a life

A week or so ago, I was running an errand through a Chicago suburb where a small liberal arts college sits among the town’s historic homes and tall old oaks and maples. It was a picturesque setting. The sun was shining. A cool breeze blew.

As I turned my car onto one of the campus streets, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a young woman and man standing in a grassy area in front of the college’s oldest, most majestic building. They were dressed in their graduation gowns, their caps. The young woman held flowers in one hand. Her other held the young man’s. They were side-by-side. She leaned on him, and their eyes looked up at the old building, as if seeing it for first time, admiring it, trying, it seemed, to remember it forever.

I wondered if they had met in a class, at a party. Maybe a football game or at the student cafeteria, eating pizza. I wondered what was next for them. Where would they go, together or apart? And I thought of all the advice they had been getting over the last few months from parents, family members, teachers, and from all the speakers at the ceremony. How much would they heed? How much would they ignore? How much would they remember tomorrow or twenty years from now?

Like many others, I could offer more advice. But I won’t. There’s plenty of it out there. A lot of it quite good. What might be better is to share instead what I think of now, many years after my own graduation, when I took my own wobbly first step into “real life.”

Some of your dreams will come true. Some, even many, will not. And that’s okay. What matters is the searching for those dreams. The longest journey in life is the ongoing hunt for our true home, the place—physical and emotional—where we are accepted and loved just as we are. And in that search will be the realization that your true home lies within yourself, and the discovery that your one and only true job is to find what poet Mary Oliver called “your one wild and previous life.”

Since my own graduation I have come to know that many things I thought would happen, did not, and might never. And again, that’s okay. I think of another poet, Albert Huffstickler. In his poem “Don’t Ask the Angels How They Fly,” he contends that when we are older, we should be at peace with the reality of lost dreams and enjoy the chance to pass our unfulfilled dreams “on to someone down the line.” Let them take the reins now and carry on the dreaming. This process, this passing of the baton is what we should rejoice. Embrace the chaos of life, the uncertainty, the mystery of it. Lean hard into what you are passionate about but also be sure of what you are not willing to tolerate. Those go hand in hand. Plan, but leave room for serendipity, for chance, for wonder. Be willing to pivot, even spin around and run in a completely new direction. It can make all the difference, not just for you, but for those who come after you.

Ah, there I go giving advice.

I’ll stop now, only to offer a quote from Oscar Wilde.

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

This, I hope, is what all that schooling has taught me, and now has taught you.

---

Photo: Olia Danilevich

Read more about the author at www.davidwberner.com