Don't ever confuse the two - your life and your work. You will
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 accounts but also
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 cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're
sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've received your 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 work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer
consider myself the centre 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 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 cut out.
But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch.
I would be rotten, 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 pay cheque, 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 at the seaside, a life in which
you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the
water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she
tries to pick up a sweet 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. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter.
Get a life in which you are generous. 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
beer 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
ours, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and
disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead
of to live.
I learned to live many years ago. 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 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 back yard 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"
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