by Anna Quindlen
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 had been diagnosed with cancer: ”No
man ever said on his deathbed, 'I wish I had spent more time at 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 the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is
what happens while you are busy making other plans."
You will 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
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 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 I meet them for
lunch. 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
a 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 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. Pick up the phone. Send an
e-mail. Write a letter. 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 in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It
is so easy to exist instead of to 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 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.”
Back To Top
In
This Issue