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 2023.
My sincere congratulations and a fond farewell to the Class of 2023. 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, Abbey Road, the journey, learning experiences, fear, friendships, knowledge, failure, and liminality. Perhaps some of the issues for me lie in that I've covered a lot of the ground that a commencement speaker 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. But this spring has been challenging in a way I didn't expect, and I found myself struggling to make a cogent series of thoughts come together.
Current wisdom holds that the oldest depiction of a ghost in extant recorded history comes from a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet that may have been an instruction guide to performing an exorcism. I've been thinking a lot about ghosts lately and how humans may have just developed the idea of ghosts to explain that some memories of the past haunt us.
Memory is intangible, no matter how hard we try to make it otherwise. We collect photographs of moments past, we record video so we can try and relive a thing that happened. We try to put things into words because words on paper seemingly give them greater heft; they do not dissolve into the ether upon leaving the mouth. But we also know that civilizations around the world valued oral tradition, and the passing down of stories in this manner was a means of weaving a tapestry of how we got to where we were at any given moment. Those stories of the past contained wisdom, knowledge, and instruction, and we did well to remember them.
But we are haunted by specters, things from the past that are present but invisible, things we cannot shake, things that we would like to forget but cannot, and things that do not get wished away or quickly. That's why we think of ourselves sometimes as haunted by our past. The memories of people we have wronged or situations where we wish we performed had been better are the things that turn into ghosts, even if we give them other names like regrets or lamentations. We cannot change the past, so we must learn from it, and perhaps ghosts settle into our orbits because in forgetting the past, we might forget the lessons taken away as well. But we can also be haunted by moments that we cannot change, we cannot make amends for, and we cannot make better. They stick close to us, a faintly visible presence that makes the air a little bit colder as it settles down next to us for a visit, not warning us when they will pop by.
(This is probably also not fair to happy memories. Happy memories are companions on the journey, they’re probably also ghosts, but friendly ones, so we don't view them as negatives or as burdens, but a part of who we are, a part that does not need to be solved, even if that might be missing the point as well.)
But, that said, I don't think that has to be true. Wisdom comes from learning from your mistakes but also learning from the mistakes of others. We cannot fall into the belief that we are "built different," a lesson the Greeks had been conveying in drama over 2,500 years ago. Hubris must always exact a cost that we cannot always know the full dimensions of until perhaps it is too late. But quite simply, I don't think we can afford to be haunted by our pasts deep into adulthood because there is too much road behind us to carry all that weight, to have spirits of all our years swarming around us would become unbearable and untenable. So we make amends when and how we can get to those we have wronged; we try to share the lessons of our past with others for the future and try not to make the same mistakes twice. Perhaps this does not banish those ghosts, but instead, it quiets them enough to live our lives for all the mundane complexities that present themselves at any moment.
This brings me to my overall point. I don't think we can choose whether we are haunted, but I believe we can choose to do the things that will, hopefully, banish the ghosts of our past to a happier rest. It would be best if you decided to do it. I am confident you can and believe you will try your best to do so. Good luck, Class of 2023.