2014 Student Speech

June 15, 2014

Good afternoon, friends and family, Stevenson faculty and staff, and my fellow graduates.

It is an incredible privilege to be here looking out at the Knoll, our meditative front yard that is quintessentially Stevenson, where I’ve spent so much time thinking about what’s to come next. And in order to fully appreciate this vantage, it is imperative to become well-versed in the language of gratitude and to learn how to practice it. On the one hand, for me, I am able to look once again at the dorm I lived in as a freshman, in House Five, where I was given the gift of three floors worth of friends, and so much more. Believe me when I say that you all really don’t know how much I’ll miss you when we all take a step forward into the next chapter of our lives as we close this one out. On the other hand, I am very fortunate to have even had this experience--of living in the dorms, of making these special relationships, and ultimately for having access to an institution of higher education--and the only reason I am here is because of the innumerable sacrifices my family has made. In particular, there are no words to express my gratitude to the woman who raised me all by herself: my mother, the most incredible person I know. Everything I am today is because of you.

Today marks not just our commencement--that is, our progression into the world at large--but today also happens to coincide with Father’s Day. So, I’d like to take a moment and acknowledge all the fathers, grandpas, and all of the fatherly figures who helped make this moment possible. In particular, I’d like to dedicate this to my own father, who is absent today because four years ago, this same month, he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. This commencement now marks the second graduation ceremony he wasn’t able to attend because of the disease, so today is my personal gift to him.

I am so indebted to this college--for affording me the tools to garner a real education by constantly challenging myself and my personal convictions, and ultimately doing so by incessantly forcing me to examine the relationship I share with the world in which I live. My education wasn’t limited to what I learned from a textbook--it also came from working in the many spaces I’ve been fortunate enough to engage with on this campus with some truly exceptional human beings. I am grateful to have been the product of a college that’s taught me how to think critically about how my individual actions shape the communities with which I identify, and how to produce changes--not by fixating on problems and remaining stagnant, but by being in a position to ask, “What can I do better? How can I be solution-based?”

I am grateful to have learned how to confront situations that seemed insurmountable: from not doing as well in a class despite having worked my tail-end off, to losing friends to suicide or to self-destructive behaviors. In these moments, I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, a well-known pessimist of the twentieth-century whose seemingly deep-rooted dislike of the world saturated many of his publications. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science and Ecce Homo, evokes the term amor fati, which, in Latin, directly translates to “love of fate.” It is meant to describe a moment when, at the end of your life, you are asked if you would do it all over again--live your life knowing full and well the highest highs and the lowest lows you’ve been through. Nietzsche reminds us that our answer to that question should only be yes, because keeping in traditionally existential fashion, you must be able to accept everything that you do, including the moments we’d often like to suppress because they once represented suffering and/or loss. Amor fati. That being said, I hope you can look back on those aforementioned challenging moments and accept them for what they are: that this is the material that helped constitute your collegiate experience in some shape or form;; that this is invariably woven into the blanket memory of college we’ll take with us long after it’s over.

Many of us are are products of a public educational system that dictated to us as high school graduates to follow a common and seemingly normative trajectory of pursuing a bachelor’s degree, despite there being many narratives that say otherwise. I think it’s safe to say that entering, and now exiting, these final quarters in college were met with the all-too common question of “what are you going to do now?” Many of us do not know what the next few months, let alone years, will look like, and while it is easy to get caught in this discouraging web often spun for members of our generation, I implore you to look at the possibility.

Don’t live your life according to dogma, which often comes with the price of self-compromise for the sake of tradition. Don’t just sit idly by doing exactly what it is that you’ve always been told to do, or, even worse, doing what is expected of you. Do what you want to do, and not what others demand. I encourage you to err in the direction of the unexpected. Break with tradition, find the friction, take a leap of faith and pursue all the routes you can take to become the best possible version of you. If that means traveling and slating your wanderlust, do just that and see all seven wonders of the world;; if it means allowing yourself to be consumed in the project of producing a positive impact in someone’s life, please do exactly that. No one’s stopping you.

But I ask that we consider the words of John Donne, the English poet, who once said that no man is an island--that what we do will inevitably affect others in some way. I hope you live knowing that what we do is not inconsequential--and I hope you love every moment of it.

So, Amor fati, I say to you, my colleagues and friends. Amor fati: would you go back and do it all over again? I know my answer. Do you?

Thank you, class of 2014, for the memories and the journey. And congratulations to all of us--we made it!