Commencement speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Anna Quindlen at Villanova University.
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 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 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 call them on the
phone, and I meet them for lunch. 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 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. Pick up the phone. Send an E-Mail.
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 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, 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 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.
you don't say
take me there shoulda coulda woulda jenny says snapshot
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