A Graduation Speech - part 2

Continuing Anna Quindlen's Graduation speech:
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.

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 15 years 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 below freezing, hiding from the police amidst the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other seasonal rides.

But 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 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. Thank you.