A Few Words Archives - Half Formed Thoughts 05/19/03

Commencement Address

This week, my best fiend Dave graduates from college. I was not invited to give the commencement address. Their loss. But this is the address I would have given, and it’s dedicated to all the graduates of 2003.

I want you to try a little experiment with me. Take a few minutes right now, and think about what you expect your life will be like five years from today. Imagine what a typical day will be for you. Where will you be living? With whom will you be spending most of your time? What will your job be? What kinds of things will you do in your free time? How much free time will you have, for that matter? To put it succinctly, how much different do you expect your life to be five years from now?

I suspect that, unless you’re a high school or college student, your vision of life in the near future is fairly close to what your life is like right now. You probably imagine yourself more or less where you are right now, except slightly better. You’ve probably gotten that promotion you’ve been working towards, which means you’ve bought yourself a slightly nicer car, or a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood, and your favorite sports team has almost certainly won a world championship or two, since every fan of any team in any professional sport believes that they are at most “two or three years away from being totally dominant,” but that’s not really important to my point.

My point is, that in terms of the basic structure of your life, you’ve probably imagined very few substantive changes. Your life in five years will probably be just like your life today, just a little bit better.

Now, remember what your life was like five years ago. Ask yourself the same questions about the past that you earlier pondered about the future. How much has your life actually changed over that span of time? Again, if you were a student five years ago, your life has almost certainly changed dramatically. Such is the accepted nature of being young.

But I’d be willing to wager that there was a lot more actual change over the past five years than there was expected change over the next five years, even for those of you who can’t attribute it to the inherent instability of youth. Personally, when I think about what has happened to me over the past five years, my mind almost boggles. I’ve lost two of my grandparents, and the only one remaining is of rapidly declining health. I’ve changed jobs four times. My mother was diagnosed with cancer, was treated successfully, but is presently battling it again. Twice, my marriage came perilously close to ending. My family moved to Connecticut for a year. And, most importantly, all those experiences have taught me a great deal about myself, and have greatly influenced my growth as a person.

The lesson of this entire exercise is that while we as human beings expect our lives to stay more or less the same, real life almost never does. We tend to think that all that turbulence we just finished going through was the aberration, and we’re just now settling into a stable equilibrium. But that is almost never the case. We like to think that we’ve somehow managed to build ourselves onto a solid, stabile foundation, blind to the powerful tectonic forces which are, as you read this, getting ready to upset the delicate balance you’ve managed to create.

And I’ve come to believe that one of the secrets to happiness is to not only accept that uncertainty, but to embrace it and actually welcome it. If it were possible to choose the amount of change in one’s life, I doubt many people would choose a high degree. We’re uncomfortable with change. It brings the unknown, and the unknown is always scary. The familiar is much more comforting. That’s the reason why some people continually find themselves in unhealthy and/or abusive relationships. It’s not that they can’t see the negatives, it’s that the familiarity of the unhealthiness is actually comforting in a way. The need to maintain the status quo is so strong that people will stay in situations even when they can rationally see that those situations are unhealthy.

I also suspect that this also contributes to the enduring appeal of religion. History charges along, empires rise and fall, while technological wonders continually transform society. But God stands above it all, omnipresent and unchanging. The God who created the universe is the very same God who watches over me and listens to me every moment of my life. Nobody grows old in Heaven, and nobody ever gets sick. In fact, nothing ever changes in Heaven, which I imagine is what makes it Heaven.

And yet, all of our efforts to keep our lives static are ultimately doomed to fail. Change happens, and there’s not a single thing any of us can do about it. Remember what you imagined your life was going to be like five years from now? Forget it, it’s never going to happen. Oh sure, you might get that promotion. You might be living in the same town. You might have the same friends. But it is highly likely that at least one thing will happen to you that will dramatically change your life, and which you would not imagine would happen in a million years. That’s life. You can fight it, but entropy always wins.

And, the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that this is in fact a good thing, not a bad thing. All of the things I have been through in the past five years may have been unpleasant at the time, but I’m glad that I have gone through them. If they had been five less eventful years, I would be less of a person. I would be less complicated, less responsible, less interesting, and most importantly, less loving.

So I’ve changed my outlook on change. I know that there’s something coming around the bend for me that’s going to shake up my world, and I can’t wait. That’s not to say that I’m going to deliberately inject chaos into my life for its own sake. The world is unstable enough without my help, and too much change is probably a bad thing in the long run. But change is definitely a positive force in the universe. And it might be a cliché to say it, but the people who are the biggest successes in life are the people who are the most comfortable with change. They embrace the future, and quickly learn to adapt to new situations.

So, my advice to you is this. Take a little bit of time every so often to marvel at where you find yourself. Whether you like where you are right now or not, you will never be there again. Enjoy it while you can, because things will be much different, much sooner than you think. And when you find your life has been turned upside down, spend as little time mourning as possible. Your success or failure in life will be determined by how well you react to change.

So go out and change something.

Email Steve with any comments at aenor@aurora.mv.com