To Live Deliberately UVU Graduation Remarks April 25, 2013 UCCU Events Center It is now my privilege to say a word. Tonight marks a moment of enormous opportunity for this sea of soon to be alumni before me. The sight of all of you is nothing short of electrifying. What an absolute thrill it is to see you here, with all that talent and training, ready now in a much more profound way to go take on the world. Some of you, no doubt, are feeling an optimism that borders on the invincible. Good for you. Though, you might benefit from just a touch more realism the kind once dished out by a quick thinking stewardess to Muhammad Ali the legendary heavy weight boxer and possibly the most self confident man who ever lived. While preparing to take off on a long flight to an overseas match, Mr. Ali was repeatedly asked to buckle his seat belt. Upon the third or fourth request, Mr. Ali smugly said, Superman don t need no seatbelt. To which the impatient flight attendant shot back, Superman don t need no airplane. Buckle up! 1 Which he did. We all have our human limits and determining what those are without letting them unduly hold us back is one the great keys to wise and successful living. As a quick aside, I will note that I recently learned my own limits in the face of an all powerful 8 year old son determined to have a pet dog. For the second time, despite my greatest hopes, wishes and protestations, the Hollands now own a dog. I actually thought I had won this battle on round one, when we bought a little puppy that was so obstinate and destructive that even my children understood the night I finally screamed, that s it, that 1 Noonan, Peggy (2009, February 6). Bracing Ourselves: America prepares for the worst, and Republicans suddenly seem serious The Wall Street Journal.
dog is killing me and wrecking the house. I simply cannot live in this house with that animal. It s going. My kids sat there crushed, striving to keep their emotions in check, until my then six year old son suddenly broke the silence by saying, Mom, if Dad if ever dies, can we get a dog? At that very moment, I knew I had won the first battle, but I was not going to win the war. By the way, round two with our new labradoodle is going much better than round one. Well, back to more serious matters. As we reflect here tonight on the path we have walked together, semester after semester, it is only fitting to feel a marvelous pride and enthusiasm over where things are headed for the university and our 4,858 new graduates UVU s largest graduating class to date! In many respects, it is impossible to calculate the collective and individual good that will be done by this record setting class as you step out of these gowns and into lab coats, coveralls, suits and scrubs in order to build, fix, invent and heal our tomorrow. Be it at the certificate, associate, bachelor or master degree levels, the institution and its astounding student body have, once again, mutually elevated one another beyond expectation. The 2012 2013 academic year saw a demonstrable rise in student and faculty accomplishment too lengthy to even start to summarize here. We also witnessed UVU s acceptance into the Western Athletic Conference, continued progress on the new Student Life and Wellness Center, and major gains in the recent legislative session, including funding to address some of our budget inequities and to build a 55 million dollar, 250,000 square foot classroom building. Despite all that, though, it is not until now, this very minute, here at the end of April, that we can behold the institution s true zenith: honoring thousands of graduates of tremendous caliber and reputation before sending
them off into a world that anxiously awaits their contributions. Truly, this is UVU s crowning achievement of the year. So, as this august group steps over the threshold of UVU s safe and supportive environment for learning, I simply leave you with one word of counsel. Shamelessly, I borrow it from a man who, on July 4, 1845, walked into a small, self built hut on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and started a two year experiment of simple living near the shores of Walden Pond. In explaining his purpose in doing so, Henry David Thoreau offered a brief manifesto of living well that I find as pertinent as ever. He said, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. 2 Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that the answer for all of you is to take your new found learning and skills and escape from the world around you into a quiet, wooded life of independence and reflection. In some ways, that is where you ve been. Thoreau himself described his time at Walden as being like a university 3 given the time it afforded him to read and think and write extensively. And, eventually, even he felt the need to leave his remote existence of self farming, literary musings, and philosophical explorations. After exactly two years, two months, and two days, he indicates that, "I left the woods for as good 2 Thoreau, H. D. (2004). Walden : a fully annotated edition (J. S. Cramer, Ed.). New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, c2004. (p. 88). 3 Ibid, p. 97
a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." 4 The point is, not choosing between transcendental escapism or industrial determination; the point is, living your life deliberately and in so doing suck the very marrow out of the vibrant and varied opportunities before you whatever those might be at any given time. To live deliberately is to live intentionally, purposefully, meditatively, studiously, resolutely and thoroughly. And, with all the skills and knowledge implicit in your UVU degree, and with what we hope is a hard commitment to life long learning, you are indeed equipped to so live. The great temptation of your day is that of resignation. From North Korean nukes, to Boston bomb blasts, to Washington Wall Street woes, the world increasingly beckons a strategy of simple survival in the face of dangerous and impersonal forces larger than you are. Don t you dare give in to that siren song survival. That is the very opposite of living deliberately. Careful and prudent, yes. Cowardly and passive, never! Remember, however bad things may look to you on any given day, this world, and this country in particular, is still filled with good people, great opportunities and sublime experiences. Finding and cultivating such, while cutting through the low, the hateful, the dishonest, the cheap, the easy, the destructive, the meaningless, and the seemingly unchangeable, that is deliberate living. That such goodness can and must be found in the midst of such rottenness is hardly exclusive to our contemporary era. One of Thoreau s other great friends, Nathaniel Hawthorne, put it picturesquely in his Preface to Mosses from and Old Manse. Speaking of the gorgeous and fragrant white pond lily, Hawthorne writes, 4 Ibid, p. 313
It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and perfume, springing, as it does, from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the mud turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world, that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results the fragrance of celestial flowers to the daily life of others. 5 Ladies and gentlemen, whatever else you face in the world around you, there rests before you an array of the most stupendous prospects in terms of the friends and families you will forge, the communities you will lead, the summits you will climb, the downtrodden you will rescue, the art, music and literature you will relish, and the professional contributions you will make. By a steady commitment to live deep, to live with a careful and deliberate pursuit of these worthwhile goods, you will, in the course of a life, make us (your parents, teachers and leaders) proud, you will make yourselves successful and satisfied, and you will prove the very purpose of your UVU education. Thank you very much. 5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1996). Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. Library Classics of the United States: New York, NY. (p. 1126).