Eternal Summer

Dear Graduates..

I have been told many adults don’t learn until late in life, or ever, what they really want to do. I have friends who have admitted to me they aren’t very interested in anything they’d want to turn into a career. So when Joel Klein told me as my class day drew to a close to “Find what I loved and go for it,” I wondered at what point in our lives we stop searching and we start going?

Its taken me a little over seven months in the professional world to finally understand how to answer this question. And here it is: There are no, and will never be, any answers. You will second guess yourself everyday. You will turn right and wonder if you should have gone left. You will regret as much of what you do as you will be proud of it. You will love and hurt the right and wrong people and let the right and wrong people love and hurt you. There is no telling how you feel when you look back many years from now at your legacy and there’s no telling what that legacy will be. The only promise you can make to yourself is to never stop. Knowing there are no answers doesn’t mean we should stop searching for them. Knowing we will get hurt doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take risks. Knowing, in fact, changes nothing about living.

Perhaps this is the great lesson of college. You can spend four years and a great deal of money only learning and walk out feeling like you know everything and nothing. As Socrates stated (here it is, that conversational intellectualism), he knew everything because he knew nothing. And that’s just the sweet irony of living. Experience doesn’t give you answers, it just means getting older, and college doesn’t give you an education, it gives you a degree. The learning, the questioning, the knowing and unknowing, that never stops – that’s just living.

So here is your freedom, not just beyond the lawn of a college campus, but beyond the belief there are right directions or right answers. The beauty of living is that it is not a test, it is a movement. Your charge is not to make it big, to change the world, or to succeed – your charge is to simply live.

The rest is unknown. -Virtual Graffiti