It’s commencement season again. Over the next couple of weeks our local colleges will ceremoniously hand out their diplomas, leaving thousands of parents feeling relieved – and the young graduates feeling slightly lost. Suddenly they feel the need for a plan that will guarantee a smooth passage through career and marriage to retirement and the nursing home and that final graduation. If you are in this situation, here’s my post-commencement advice about your life plan.
Michael, my best friend at high school, had a detailed life plan by the age of fifteen. He had it all worked out: a degree in economics, a safe government job, a little house, a wife, two children, and early retirement at sixty to a resort on the coast. I’ve lost touch with him, but I hope he made it. If he did he’s been retired twenty years by now, and is almost certainly a grandfather, or even a great grandfather.
I never had such a plan, and I never missed it. When I was at school my only plan was to get out of it. So I escaped from the educational gulag at the age of sixteen, only to return and graduate from university a dozen years later. By that time I had a wife, a house, a car, a cat, a dog, and two jobs – the whole catastrophe. I was too busy to go to my graduation, or to think about plans of any kind.
The traditional role of the commencement speaker is to suggest at least the outlines of a life plan by promoting positive thoughts and values. Unfortunately nobody agrees what these are, so graduates get mixed messages. The trouble with most commencement speakers is that they tend to offer dumb and discouraging metaphors: life as a mountain to climb, life as a race to be run, life as a challenge and a pilgrimage, and even life as a game to be played. But in reality life is a just a series of things that happen to you one after another for no particular reason, some of which are amusing and some not. We know from quantum physics that randomness is at the center of how the world is put together at the subatomic level. Experience confirms that this randomness goes all the way up, perhaps all the way to the White House. This is good because, without randomness, life plans might actually work out and we would all die of boredom halfway through.
A certain amount of life planning is necessary of course. Even the freest of free spirits must remember to collect his or her salary check, and stock up with cat food on a regular basis. But there’s no need to overdo it. Long-term life plans, like stock market projections, are dust blowing in the wind. That wonderful eighteenth century letter writer, the Reverend Sidney Smith, advised his correspondents: “To take short views of life, never further than dinner or tea.” By following this advice all of us, and especially politicians, might avoid the embarrassment that ensues when grandiose and improbable long-term plans come to nothing.
Congratulations to all the new graduates. Stay focused on dinner, or tea, and you won’t go far wrong.
Copyright: David Bouchier
