Dear
graduating class of 2016:
On June 14th, 1989, a
few steps from here at what’s now Key Arena, I graduated from Roosevelt High
School. I was obnoxious and inserted extra names on my name card as a shout-out
to friends and also dolled up my big 1980s hair. I did the hair thing so often—nesting
toys like a purple monkey up in my fro—that I won Most Distinctive Hairstyle in
the Senior poll. I was very excited to be graduating, because I knew how
happiness was made and how it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t made running day
after day from one period to the next filling out multiple choice tests in the
company of arbitrary communities until a day a counselor could look at a piece
of paper and label me educated.
This is why the graduation
announcement I sent around the country opened to the following words: “Come see
me receive a rolled-up piece of blank parchment and hear the saccharin speeches
of the select bureaucrats who have slowly been swallowing the fruits of my
education and who will not leave so much as an impression upon my life (or
yours) as an aftertaste.”
Here’s the point: Adults thought
they knew the important building blocks of our happiness. I was pretty sure
they didn’t. But now I’ve spent more than half my life at Roosevelt, and I’m
now the adult, here to deliver my very own saccharin commencement address.
What’s more, I do think I’m wiser than you, in some
respects. For example, if you put purple monkeys in your hair, I will laugh
knowingly and say, “Ha ha, yes. Cute.” But I also think that adults much too
easily dismiss the vibrant passions and thoughts of adolescents, probably
because you say and do some really
stupid things; still, many of these passions and thoughts and questions are
absolutely visionary and can indeed guide a life that’s rich with adventure,
love, compassion, artistry, commitment and devotion to a just, healthy world;
and I do think you already know both the major building blocks and the
stumbling blocks to a happy life, and have developed strategies to dealing with
both.
One thing I-think-you-think-you-know-but-I-no-longer-believe
is that to be happy, you must do work that you love: “If you do what you love,
you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” This idea is dangerous, and not
just because it’s elitist when so many in our country can’t make such choices,
but because it’s spiritually misleading.
If you can find a job you love, that’s
terrific, that’s great. I have two friends who are poets, one who’s a clown,
and one who’s a professional artisanal pencil sharpener. They‘ve found ways to
earn livelihoods out of their passions. I love my job too—about a quarter of
the time, just like I love you all a
quarter of the time. But I’m not talking about me, or poets or clowns or
artisanal pencil sharpeners. Too many people I know feel like they’ve blown it
somewhere because they’re not passionate about their jobs; they’re deeply
dissatisfied with their very lives, believing a job is a way happiness is made
and then demoralizing themselves when they try to force it to be so. But there’s
nothing wrong in life with a not-perfect job that pays the bills.
Love your family, your friends,
your co-workers; love artistic and spiritual pursuits. You don’t have to love
your job.
That’s one thing I don’t trust
you to fathom right now, and, really, you shouldn’t: go forth and honor your
passions and interests; but in five or ten years, remember that you were given
permission to place your identity in something other than what you do to get
by.
Everything else I want to tell
you this evening, you already know. If you’re like I was in Seattle Arena in 1989,
you’re idealistic and judgmental and you know something about how happiness is
made and how it isn’t, and you’re right to be idealistic and judgmental.
You know adults in your life who
aren’t happy, and you know why: They’re working too hard, or they’re too
focused on things that don’t ultimately matter, or they no longer try new
things. Anyway, that’s what it may look like, and you may not be far off. I
know I’m this adult often enough:
it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just get through the day and week and then
zombie out in front of a screen as an easy but not very effective means of rest
and renewal.
I also know that that’s been you.
Are you okay with that? Who are you in the moment you are most numb
and overwhelmed? How do you get through it? How do you revive? The struggles and
strategies you employed in high school you can lean on for the rest of your
life. But if you aren’t good at dealing with your coping mode now, you better
work on it, because, believe me, what you felt the night before key terms were
due or when you were struggling to make sense of my ridiculous writing rubric
or when you had to sit politely through a long, ceremonial speech—that detached
sense of a sometimes frantic coping—that is not unique to high school; and
without self-reflection and deliberate action, you could be stuck following a
pattern that will hurt and dull you. “When abstraction sets to killing you,” as
Albert Camus says in The Plague, “you’ve
got to get busy with it.”
So
what do I do? I read. I surf the net.
Once a week, my wife and I go to dinner and come home and watch something on
Netflix. That’s not enough. Certainly purple-monkeyed David would not be
impressed with his adult self. But sometimes I write. Sometimes I dance with my
daughters. We lived in Hungary for a year and tried new routines. Sometimes I
bask in my family’s music (though sometimes I hide). At work I’ve been able to
revive by taking on Meghan O’Kelley in a rap battle, or by getting a hug from Jessamyn,
or by getting a big, clapping, Julianna Quinn Hello. I also do take full advantage of the holiday
moments that stop routine and demand reflection, like every year when I
graduate from Roosevelt and think back on what I learned and where I’m going
and whom I’ve grown to cherish. These are building blocks for happiness.
As
for you, I know one thing you do is seek out new experience and adventure.
You’re way up on adults with this one. Studies show novel encounters trigger the
brain’s limbic system, which is where happiness is made; and yet adults often
find themselves in a comfortable soothing stagnation. Getting out of a comfort
zone allows a greater shot at making happiness and memories, and when you’re
making vivid memories, you’re also slowing down the high speed blur of time
passing. Many studies have shown that, after basic needs are met, experience brings
about more happiness than material things. Even a bad experience turns into a
good story. So travel; take a dance class; go to a monster truck rally: hang on to your sense of adventure, especially
when it seems easier to just stay home.
Another
thing you do beautifully is engage with sensitive immediacy. This includes
responding to the world’s wounded-ness, or expressing the social patterns
undergirding your own pain. I only have time for platitudes at this point, but
I’m saying what you already know; I repeat it because it’s too easy to get
swept up in our own dramas and deadlines. Give everyone their due humanity—the partisan,
the panhandler, the person cutting you off in traffic: shut down the clannish outrage
machine and the numbing distant busy-ness of your life to respond to the
humanity and pain in others and thus engage in the bright, tender humanity of
your own. This keeps you vital and vibrant too.
My younger self believed in the
importance of questions and wrote in a journal that questions are more
important than answers. I agree with me. So here’s one final meditation,
because I can’t get off the stage without inviting us all to wonder about the
dominant social interloper of our lives—the Internet. You know how plants use
animals to reproduce? Like when a bear eats some berries and wanders off and
then poops out the berry seeds in some other territory and the seeds stick to
the ground in their own soft fertilizing goodness? You know how a plant uses a
bear? How is the internet using you? How has your smartphone been training your
mind to behave?
Okay, that’s it. Because you
already know how happiness is made and how it’s not, I remind you only to be
purposeful: not just loving but deliberately grateful, admiring, understanding
and warm; not just happy but deliberately reflective, creative, friendly and
bold; not just generous, but deliberately empathetic, healing, humble and kind.
To the graduating class of 2016,
I leave you with this impression, and this aftertaste. May your lives be filled
with love. I’ll miss you. Thank you.
David Grosskopf
David Grosskopf
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