Background: Every year from 2003 to 2011, I contributed my "Words of Wisdom" to the "Staff Advice" portion of the Senior issue of the Stevenson Spotlight.
Then, like many newspapers, The Spotlight went on hiatus in 2012 (even if it had a resurgence in 2014–16), so I still needed to share my wisdom somewhere. I've gone longer form in recent years, and well, since the cost of digital ink is low, I'm OK with that.
But I still wished the Seniors who friended me on Facebook good luck. So, here are my Words of Wisdom for the Class of 2022.
My sincere congratulations and a fond farewell to the Class of 2022. My standard disclaimer to begin: Be careful. Be safe. Be smart. And remember, only you can prevent forest fires.
By late May, I have a solid sense of what form my remarks to the departing senior class will look and feel like. I've written a few of these; I've written on patience, on Abbey Road, the journey, learning experiences, fear, friendships, knowledge, and liminality. Perhaps some of the issues for me lie in that I've covered a lot of the ground that a commencement speaker who might only have to do this once in their life, if even that. When I'm linking to my back catalog, it partly tells me I can't reheat some leftovers and call it a balanced meal. I also will note that you never know from where inspiration will strike. To wit:
Yes, I am drawing inspiration from a Twitter account that reimagines the one-time Chancellor of the Klingon High Council in the Star Trek universe as an athletic coach who posts inspirational messages. He also had this tweet:
But the failure piece is vital to consider. So many of you, well, at least those who are willing to read something like this from me, have lived a life built around avoiding failure because failure carries the burden of massively negative denotations and connotations. Failure means you didn't succeed; you didn't get what you thought you deserved, often because someone else did. Collectively, as a people, we have a nasty tendency to see success as the natural order of things and failure as some deep personal flaw.
Success and failure are not an all-or-nothing duality. They are not an either/or, not an "if you're not first, you're last" construction. There are degrees of success and failure, and the people who wish to tell you otherwise are likely trying to sell you something because those people want you to feel that way. They want you to feel like any failure is a judgment upon who you are as a person, a rendered judgment of your being.
There is a fine line between the failures you learn from and get better from and the failures that leave a lasting mark on your soul. Sometimes it's easy to know it, but on other occasions, you may go looking for the scar somewhere down the line only to find it wasn't as prominent or as deep as you first suspected. The simple truth is you can't always know because you also have some measure of control over how those failures impact you. That said…
"I'm sure this goes against everything you've been taught, but right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right answer is - maybe there's even no way you could know what the right answer is - doesn't make your answer right or even okay. It's much simpler than that. It's just plain wrong."
That was the culmination of an episode in season one of House, M.D., and it has stuck with me for going on two decades now. Part of the problem with failure is that we often look at it as "Oh if I had just done this one thing differently, everything would have been fine." It's a convenient fiction; we tell this to ourselves to move on from things because we can't prove the thesis wrong. But the reality is also straightforward. Life isn't about what happens to us; it's about how we react. That is sometimes easier said than done. It has the unintended consequence of handwaving the impacts of traumatic events on people because they should have responded better. I cannot deny those realities, nor would I want to do so. I choose to believe that this is about making the best of your moment as best you can.
This essay sat in my drafts for a long time because I really didn't know how to finish it. Valedictions traditionally are designed to leave one on a happy note, but the reality of time is so often reflected in these eight lines from a song from 30 years ago:
Half an hour later
We packed up our things
We said we'd send letters
And all of those little thingsThey knew we were lying
They smiled just the same
And it seemed they'd already
Forgotten we'd came
We say goodbye because we have to at this moment. These days will recede in your mind, and ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, you will be stunned by what you still remember and what you can never forget. But that's how life works. I just hope you remember that failing well is a thing so long as you take the proper lessons from it. Thank you.