Graduation 2013 - What to Build

Graduation 2013

Welcome parents, faculty, staff, Board of Trustees, friends, and students. Congratulations to you, the class of 2013.

As a class, you are thoughtful, kind, helpful, cohesive, bright, wise beyond your years, and excellent role models. You've already accomplished much, and you stand at the precipice of incredible things to come.

Graduation ceremonies are opportunities to reflect, assess, and for me to have just one last chance to point you as a group in the right direction, or at least for you to hear me as a cohesive whole, where you have to pay attention.

Graduation speeches are meant to inspire and guide, to chastise and advise, to speak in platitudes and to describe that which can't be described.

As you prepare for life outside of your family homes, and since I can't promise to deliver on each of those aims, I'll keep my message simple: build something solid, practical, and portable.

As a class, you are incredible consumers and sharers of information  - books, music, photographs, ideas, hopes, fears, and so on. In some sense, your entire universe. You most likely have at least one or two devices or tools to do that that:  iphone, ipad, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. From cats playing pattycake to inspiring causes to do real good in the world, some of what you've shared or seen has ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, but it all contribute to you, your identity and how you construct your lives.

I could spend a great deal of time discussing the relative merits and drawbacks to our interconnectedness through social media, but instead, I think I’ll bring this back to what I believe to be a more essential point about our lives together, here.

You’ve built social networks, certainly, but what are they based on? Which of those networks promote truth and ethics, and, portability? In short, once those networks pass into obscurity due to advances in technology or the whims of trendiness and the latest newest thing, what persists and what is it that you take with you?

That which is essential to your identity can be carried with you and will be with you wherever you are. If it's built right, it can’t be modified and warped and mutated by forces that aren’t concerned with your undeniable singularity and value as a person in the world, and a force of change for the right things in life.

So build something strong and real.

A chair, for example.

A chair has a particular purpose. You sit in in. In its essential form, its purpose dictates its final shape – the correlation of both purpose and shape are essential in the construction of the most useful and portable items you will own and use. That being said, I would guess that each of you, were you to imagine a chair right now, would imagine an incredible variety of chairs, each of which shares an essential 'chair-ness' that gives it its purpose.

Your identity is no different. What you say about yourselves and how you present yourselves to others is, in its purest meaning, is a direct expression of your values and your lives as you want to live them. Not just for the next ten minutes, or for the next faddish cause, but in the core of what you are and what is important. How you build your own 'chair' depends directly on your ability to seek out and find the materials necessary to build something that you can take with you - something that is sturdy and whose form is a direct expression of its function.

As you begin your lives outside of your parents' homes, you'll need supplies beyond the simple chair. You'll need shelves, tables, blankets, plates, cutlery, glasses, a can opener maybe, and a laundry basket. You could, in fact, build each of these things, but you've got other things to do, so you'll probably want to buy some of them, pre-made or partially pre-made. You'll also need other things that can't be bought or sold, but that can only be created with practice, passion, and dedication. Those things are built over time and among those who care for and love you, but you can't see or hold those things, they are only there to be used and they are the things that bring goodness into the world.

In the next few weeks, months and years, some of you may find yourselves in a place like IKEA to prepare you for your first months and years of post-familial home life. For those of you who don't know what IKEA is, it's an enormous box store in which you are supposed to be able to buy all you need to live a modest, practical albeit bland life. In addition to chairs, at IKEA you can also purchase beds, bedding, shelves, plants, plates, candles, and even Swedish meatballs. Most of these items come in a flat-packed box with various dimensions of particle board, cheap wood, screws, fasteners, casters, handles, and laminate. Everything there, including the meatballs, is built to typically austere and eminently practical Northern European aesthetics.

And, each box includes picture-only instructions designed to be understood by anyone, no matter what language you speak - Esperanto for the pragmatic, I suppose.

The instructions might confuse you, as there are no words, only pictograms showing how to, in the end, make your life more efficient, organized, and responsible. But with patience and fortitude, even if you're all by yourself, you can eventually build the thing you've purchased and, hey presto, you've got yourself a furnished apartment!

If you follow the instructions.

If you're like me, following instructions isn't always the first impulse. But if I don't, i guarantee that I'll have a few screws loose at the end and the thing I tried to put together won't be sturdy, practical, or really very useful at all.

The thing about IKEA is that, even if you follow all the instructions, picture by picture, page by page, with your single hex key in hand, you still end up with a mediocre product, one that is fine as long as you don't plan to move it - its value is short-lived and site-specific. Not you-specific. IKEA promotes the idea that all you need is one tool, some time, and you can build anything you need all by yourself. And therein lies the problem.

God, in his infinite wisdom, has a plan and nothing happens by accident. Believing that and resigning ourselves to follow the right directions and to understand that we don't have all the answers is a sign of courage and a sign of faith. Our motto. Fideliter et Fortiter, Faithfully and Bravely, is our core belief and one which guides us to become part of the great and infinitely complex movement of our world to which we are charged with building to the best of our ability.

So, back to IKEA: the underlying assumption at IKEA is that it's possible to get everything we need in one place; that convenience and an all-things-to-all-people mentality is a desirable end; that we can do everything ourselves alone. They've  designed nearly everything to be constructed with only one small, multi-use tool. It performs every function one might need, and because the lowest common denominator is the aim within the design and functionality of these products, the inspired wisdom of the individual is eliminated and their products are inferior.

And, by the way, in case you haven't had them, the meatballs aren't all that great, either.

I strongly disagree with their underlying assumptions about the value of things and the value of work and creativity. The world is so much richer and more beautiful when the spirit of each individual can express and create and live and feel, in very particular, unique, non-standard ways, to the meaning we are here to create and the love we're here to build and share.

So, on what or whom can we rely?

The answer seems simple: we can and should be able to rely on each other.

In the wreckage of the storms recently, many will be rebuilding. They’ll need a multitude of tools, resources, and most important, they’ll need the willingness and generosity of others willing to help and to rebuild.

I read that the wreckage from the Moore tornadoes, if stacked on a basketball court, would reach more than a mile high. That’s a lot of wreckage. Looking at you and all those who have supported you up until this moment, I see its contrast: a shining tower of inspiration, enlightenment, and wonder, built over years and with a passion to make things better.

The destruction we cause and discover around us will dissipate and become subsumed only by tear-stained toil, the passage of time and the drive to build again something beautiful and right. The thing I hope you’ll carry with you on your journeys will be the light that has grown within you and within all of us here. That's what is lasting and powerful and essentially yours, wherever you decide to go.