Conference turris::womannotes-v3

817.0. "Advice for Graduation..." by NAC::BENCE (The Galloping Gourmet) Wed May 15 1991 16:18

This is a speech that Alan Alda gave at his daughter's graduation from 
college.
	

Condensed from Connecticut College News
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"Dig Into The World", by Alan Alda

The best things said come last.  People will talk for hours saying 
nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a 
rush from the heart.

We are all gathered at a doorway today.  We linger there with our hand 
on the knob chattering away like Polonius to Laertes.  Now remember, 
'Neither a borrower nor a lender be...' and don't forget, 'This above 
all: To thine own self be true...'

But the very best things said often slip out completely unheralded, 
preceded by, "Oh, by the way."  In real life, when Polonius had 
finished giving all that fatherly advice to his son - who probably 
wasn't paying much attention anyway - he must have said, "Oh, by the 
way, if you get into trouble, don't forget that you can always call me 
at the office."

As we stand in the doorway today, these are my parting words to my 
daughter.  There are so many things I want to tell you, Eve.

The first thing is: don't be scared.  You're being flung into a world 
that's running about as smoothly as a car with square wheels.  It's 
okay to be uncertain.  You're an adult in a time when the leaders of 
the world are behaving like children.  Where the central image of the 
day is a terrorist one: humane concerns inhumanely expressed.  And the 
only response to this is impotent fury.  If you weren't a little 
uncertain, I'd be nervous for you.

Adulthood has come upon you and you're not all that sure you're ready 
for it.  I think sometimes I'm not ready for adulthood either - yours 
or mine.

The day before yesterday you were a baby.  I was afraid to hold you 
because you seemed so fragile.  Yesterday, all I could feel was 
helplessness when you broke your nine-year-old arm.  Only this 
morning you were at teen-ager.  As I get older, the only thing that 
speeds up is time.  But if time is a thief, time also leaves something 
in exchange; experience.  And with experience, at least in your own 
work you will be sure.

Love your work.  If you always put your heart into everything you do, 
you really can't lose.  Whether you wind up making a lot of money or 
not, you will have had a wonderful time, and no one will ever be able 
to take that away from you.  

I want to squeeze things great and small into this lingering good-by.  
I want to tell you to keep laughing.  You gurgle when you laugh.  Be 
sure to gurgle three times a day for your own well-being.  And if you 
can get other people to join you in your laughter, you may help keep 
this shaky boat afloat.  When people are laughing, they're generally 
not killing one another.

I have this helpless urge to pass on maxims to you, things that will 
see you through.  But even the Golden Rule doesn't seem adequate to 
pass on to a daughter.  There should be something added to it.  Here's 
my Golden Rule for a tarnished age:  Be fair with others, but then 
keep after them until they're fair with you.

It's a complex world.  I hope you'll learn to make distinctions.  A 
peach is not its fuzz, a toad is not its warts, a person is not his or 
her crankiness.  If we can make distinctions, we can be tolerant, and 
we can get to the heart of our problems instead of wrestling endlessly 
with their gross exteriors.

Once you make the habit of distinctions, you'll begin challenging your 
own assumptions.  Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub 
them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.  If you 
challenge your own, you won't be so quick to accept the unchallenged 
assumptions of others.  You'll be a lot less likely to be caught up in 
bias or prejudice, or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over 
your brains, your soul or money because they have everything figured out 
for you.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it's always better to be wise 
than smart.  And don't be upset that it takes a long, long time to find 
wisdom.  Like a rare virus, wisdom tends to break out at unexpected 
times, and it's most likely people with compassion and understanding who 
are susceptible to it. 

The door is inching a little closer toward the latch and I still haven't 
said it.  Let me dig a little deeper.  Life is absurd and meaningless - 
unless you make something of it.  It is up to us to create our own 
existence.

No matter how loving or loved we are, it eventually occurs to most of us 
that deep down inside, we're all alone.  When the moment comes for you to 
wrestle with that cold loneliness, which is every person's private 
monster, I want you to face the same thing.  I want you to see it for 
what it is and win.

When I was in college, 25 years ago, the philosophy of existentialism was 
very popular.  We all talked about nothingness; but we moved into a world 
of effort and endeavor.  Now no one much talks about nothingness; but the 
world itself is filled with it.

Whenever that sense of absurdity hits you, I want you to be ready. It 
will have a hard time getting hold of you if you're already in motion.  
You can use the skills of your profession and other skills you have 
learned here, dig into the world and push it into better shape.

For one thing, you can try to clean the air and water.  Or you can try to 
make the justice system work, too.  You can bring the day a little closer 
when the rich and the privileged have to live by the same standards as
the poor and the outcast.

You can try to put an end to organized crime - that happy family whose 
main objective is to convince us they don't exist while they destroy a 
generation with drugs and suck the life from our economy.

You can try to find out why people of every country and religion have at 
one time or another found it so easy to make other people suffer.  (If 
you really  want to grapple with absurdity, try understanding how people 
can be capable of both nurture and torture; can worry and fret over a 
little girl caught in a mine shaft, yet destroy a village and everyone in 
it with hardly the blink of an eye.)  You can try to stop the next war 
now, before it starts, to keep old men from sending children away to die.

And while you're doing all of that, remember that every right you have as 
a woman was won for you by women fighting hard.  There are little girls 
being born right now who won't even have the same rights as you do unless 
you act to maintain and extend the range of equality.  The nourishing 
stew of civilized life doesn't keep bubbling on its own.  Put something 
back in the pot for the people in line behind you.

There's plenty to keep you busy for the rest of your life.  I can't
promise this will ever completely reduce that sense of absurdity, but 
it may get it down to a manageable level.  It will allow you once in a 
while to bask in the feeling that, all in all, things do seem to be 
moving forward.

I can see your brow knitting in that way that I love.  That crinkle 
between your eyebrows that signals your doubt and your skepticism.  
Why - on a day of such excitement and hope - should I be talking of 
absurdity and nothingness?  Because I want you to focus that hope and 
level that excitement into coherent rays that will strike like a laser 
at the targets of our discontent.

I want you to be potent; to do good when you can, and to hold your wit 
and your intelligence like a shield against other people's wantonness. 
And above all, to laugh and enjoy yourself in a life of your own 
choosing and in a world of your own making.  I want you to be strong 
and aggressive and tough and resilient and full of feeling.  I want 
you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.

I want you to have chutzpah.  Columbus had chutzpah.  The signers of 
the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.  Laugh at yourself but 
don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.  Be bold.  When you embark for 
strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore.  Have the 
nerve to go into unexplored territory.

Be brave enough to live life creatively.  The creative is the place 
where no one else has ever been.  You have to leave the city of your 
comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  You can't get 
there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what 
you're doing.  What you'll discover will be wonderful.  What you 
discover will be yourself.

Well, those are my parting words as today's door closes softly between 
us.  So long, be happy.......

Oh, by the way, I love you.

    that was wonderful reading..thanks for typing it in.
    
    Kath