HS #83 2022.6.9
High School Commencement Address
Faculty and staff, relatives and friends, 2022 graduates: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” This line of poetry from Mary Oliver is powerful and profound. Say it aloud – commit it to memory. Take it with you as a guide in life.
Let’s ponder it a bit. “Tell me” forces us to clarify our thoughts. It’s not enough to have just a vague answer to so important a question.
“What is it you plan to do?” That is, YOU are in charge. You have the freedom AND the awful responsibility. The Statue of Liberty needs a counterpart, “The Statue of Responsibility.” As John Steinbeck explains in East of Eden, the Hebrew word “Timshel” – “Thou mayest” captures both ideals. We have the agency and must bear the consequences.
“With this one” – there are no second chances. As the TV soap opera is titled, “One Life to Live.”
“Wild and precious life” – “Precious” since every moment is valuable – each moment provides opportunity for us to experience and interact with the universe. What about “wild”? In Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis describes Aslan the Lion as wild. “He’s not a tame lion.” Wild means unpredictable and not controlled. Even with best laid plans, things won’t go as you anticipate or want. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. The floating feather which begins and ends “Forrest Gump” catches the inherent randomness of our lives. No one saw COVID coming. Read Endurance. Only the singular grit and focus of Earnest Schackleton saved his Antarctic crew from unexpected twists of nature.
That was poetry – now a couple short stories remembered from my high school senior year. I didn’t understand them then, but they keep recurring to me.
The first tells of a person visiting a friend’s home and noticing a goldfish bowl with nothing but a single motionless goldfish hovering in the water and a penny lying at the bottom. The owner explains that the penny keeps the goldfish alive indefinitely without feeding. Then the person discovers how: The penny leaches copper into the water which all but kills the fish. The goldfish is alive – but just barely. It continues living because it doesn’t have energy to move – it just exists. A long life of meaningless existence.
The second complimentary story tells of a flea which has spent its entire adult life on a leaf of a shrub by a forest path. The flea just waits, waits, waits for a warm-blooded animal – perhaps a deer – to amble by. Then it LEAPS! If successful, it lands on the back of the deer, then buries into the fur, drinks blood, develops and lays eggs, and dies – its life-mission fulfilled. If it misses the target, it falls to the ground withers and dies. No energy for a second chance.
“A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman captures a similar theme. Find it and read it. We are like a spider that sends out filament, filament, filament to catch in the wind and attach ourselves to the world. Notice the recurring theme of this essay? The combination of intention and randomness. The spider has no idea which web will catch – or if any will. But it DOES know that if it is to successfully live, it must send them out – it must keep trying. Failure is guaranteed if it quietly exists like the goldfish.
Poetry, short stories – what’s left? Today’s art form is video games. Question: If you could plot out your life trajectory, what would you choose? Most might choose a gradually inclining line in which the good things of life are steadily increasing. Picture that – like rolling a ball up a gentle slope until it gets to the top. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Tell me, would you play a video game like that? Of course not – how boring! If such a monotonous video game isn’t appealing, why do you want such a life? Instead, a game worth playing is one with challenging pitfalls and risk-laden opportunities to seize the moment.
Tell me, what is it YOU plan to do with your one wild and precious life? As I write this, NPR radio is telling of Calvin University’s Prison Initiative. Twenty inmates each year – most of them serving life sentences – are graduating from Calvin’s prison campus. Their leap, their filaments, their choices brought them a lifetime in prison. But they are now flinging out new filaments and making the most of their lives. Will you?
