Commencement speeches are engineered to inspire those beginning a new phase of life. They are meant to be epic, a benediction offering direction, courage and motivation, an address to the fresh battalion, a manifesto unique to a specific group of people and moment in time.
I’ve been watching a lot of them online recently: movie stars, scientists and comedians dressed in colorful and entirely unearned robes and mortarboards, reading words most likely written by roomfuls of America’s most lauded professionals. O, how the young near-graduates laugh!
About three quarters of the way through, these speeches always turn serious, offering heartfelt pleas to “always be yourselves” or “don’t let the bastards get you down” before rising to an inspirational and lightly tearful summit.
We get one these speeches the end of high school, maybe a few more if we choose to go to college or graduate school, but that’s it. We deserve more of these. They are admittedly wasted on anxious young people mere minutes away from the freedom to not follow anyone’s advice.
That being said, I did not remember who spoke at my own graduation.
I had to look it up.
It was Stephen J. Gould, zoologist, a very accomplished Harvard professor who wrote numerous books concerning evolution, stood against cultural oppression, spoke five different languages and loved baseball, books and light opera. A leader in science and history, the Library of Congress described him as “a living legend”.
I do not remember a single word he said at that ceremony.
I also did not remember the then-president of the university’s closing speech (I found a quote online from the school newspaper):
“…our experiment in creating a republic of virtue passes to your hands…the civic ideal in America is your conception to grapple with, for better or worse.”
Well, I should have paid more attention to that. Though now it seems a bit of a lazy hand-off, a toss of the national car keys with a tepid “…it only takes premium gas and there isn’t a spare tire…but, y’know, good luck with it.”
Lest you now believe I am just a fanboy of ceremonial oratory, I must explain that what I’ve sought from these speeches was comforting, useful advice from people older than me, who were “there before me”, in the style of Yoda, or Uncle Ben, or Mr. Miyagi, or any role played by Morgan Freeman.
Problem 1 - there are so many fewer people ‘older than me’ now. It’s hard to find anyone on my subway car who might have seen “Gilligan’s Island”.
Problem 2 - it’s impossible to have been HERE before me because NOBODY has been HERE before. This time and space is bananas. We live in a combination of Wonderland, The Matrix, and wherever Milo’s car went when he entered The Phantom Tollbooth.
At school, I had been carefully prepped to take on the world that existed at that time - at the end of my graduation ceremony I threw a hat in the air and stepped bravely into a whirlwind of what I believed to be predictable instability.
What possible advice could anyone have offered on that day that would have successfully charted a course through the internet and smart phones? It would be petty to blame the hyper-genius zoologist, who very likely said something super useful like, “Evolve!”… but I wasn’t paying attention.
Now I’m Morgan Freeman. I’m the old person. In a mentor role I speak calmly to expectant faces who look to me for virtual pins to drop in the map app on their metaphorical life-phones: direction, paths through the chaos.
I do not have a room filled with WGA writers, so “don’t look down” is the best I’ve got. Back when everyone was taller than me, I used to look up more than I looked down - classroom blackboards, movie screens at the multiplex, the sky outside. I held the books I read in front of my uplifted head, never down at my belly.
And I didn’t just look up - I looked out, away from myself, navigating the immediate challenges of physical space rather than the potential dreads of an endless digital universe. Don’t look down. No matter what your life brings, meet it eye to eye. Live where you are.
Ok, well, even back then I didn’t pay attention all the time, but at least my head was filled with my own memories and experiences. For instance, once I was stranded on a desert island with a movie star, a professor, and this girl named Mary Ann…
