The Grey Room

Writer, Anna Quindlen, to the
  graduates at Villanova ...

    It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive
an honorary doctorate from this great university.  It's an honor to follow
my great Uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a
remarkable businessman.  Both of them could have told you something
important about their professions, about medicine or commerce.  I have no
specialized field of interest or expertise. 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. The second is only part of the first.

    Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the
senator decided not to run for reelection because he had been diagnosed with
cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed, 'I wish I had spent more time at
the office.'"

    Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year:
"If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

    Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of
the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

    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
our 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 I 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.
Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life
in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all.
And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of
all:  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.