This was a speech made by Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an
American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.
"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. 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 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
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".
(Thank
you Mak Siti.)