Anna Quindlen�s
Villanova Commencement Address
It�s a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an
honorary doctorate from this great university. It�s an honor to follow
my great-uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a
remarkable businessman.
Both of them could have told you something important about their professions,
about medicine or commerce. I have no specialized field of interest or
expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today. I�m a
novelist. My work is human nature.
Real life is all I know. Don�t ever confuse the two, your life and your
work. The second is only part of the first. Don�t ever forget
what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to
run for reelection because he�d been diagnosed with cancer: �No
man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the
office.�
Don�t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year:� �If you win the rat race, you�re still a
rat.� Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the
driveway of the Dakota:� �Life is what
happens while you are busy making other plans.�
You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has.
There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will
be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will
be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life: Your particular
life; your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life
on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of
your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account,
but your soul. People don�t talk about the soul very much anymore.
It�s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you�re sad, or
broke, or lonely, or when you�ve gotten back the test results and they�re not
so good.
Here is my resume. I am a good mother to three children. I have tried
never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I
no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I
listen. I try to laugh.
I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows
mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I
am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there
would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout.
But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show
up. I listen. I try to laugh.
I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were
not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your
work is all you are. So here�s what I wanted to tell you today: get a
life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the
bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you�d care so very much
about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a
lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a
breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red
tailed hawk circles over the water gap or the way a baby scowls with
concentration when she tries to pick up a cheerio with her thumb and first
finger. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people
you love, and who love you.
And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time you look
at your diploma, remember that you are still a student, still learning how to
best treasure your connection to others. Pickup the phone. Send an
email. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad.
Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas in the
suburban neighborhood where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver
in a black, black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is the best
thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so
deeply about its goodness that you want
to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to
charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or
sister.
All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then
doing
well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our
hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of
the azaleas, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color
of our kids� eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and
falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist
instead of live.
I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened
to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my
druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned
from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I
learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is
not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I
learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give
some of it back because I believed in it completely and
utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I
had learned.
By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the
fuzz on a baby�s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face.
Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because
if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
Well, you can learn all those things, out there, if you get a real life, a
full life, a professional life, yes, but another life, too, a life of love
and laughs and a connection to other human beings. Just keep your eyes and
ears open. Here you could learn in the classroom. There the classroom
is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on
his deathbed, I wish I had spent more time at the office.
I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15
years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the
homeless survive in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the
wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his
schedule, panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone,
sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding
from the police amidst the Tilt a Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the
other seasonal
rides.
But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the
water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to
wear his newspapers after he read them. And I asked him why. Why didn�t
he go to one of the shelters? Why didn�t he check himself into the
hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, �Look at the
view, young lady. Look at the view.�
Everyday, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the
view. And that�s the last thing I have to tell you today, words of
wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere to
be. Look at the view. You�ll never be disappointed.