Empty Sky Witness

Words of Wisdom from an Unlikely Source

“Every graduation speech ever written starts with a simple fact: “commencement” means something beginning, not ending. You see it as the endpoint of something, because it’s the end of the whole world that you know. And every grownup and parent and teacher in the room knows it’s the opposite, so they enlighten you with a little vocab. They’re not wrong. But they’re also not precisely right, because it’s been too long for them to remember that it’s both. It’s the beginning of what they think is the real story, and sometime soon you’ll agree. You’ll forget that any of this mattered. You’ll turn around and condescend to the kids that come after you, and assure them that it’s not something ending, it’s just the beginning. Real life starts here.

But you’ll get the same speech when you graduate college, when you have a kid, when you turn twenty, when you turn thirty. When you turn forty, oh my God they’ll tell you that speech a million times when you turn forty. “This is when your life starts. This is when it’s real. This is when it starts mattering. Everything before this was stupid and doesn’t mean anything. This is the day you become real.”

And you can feel relief, every time, because the last chapter was so fucking exhausting and you learned so much and hurt so much and changed so much, it really does feel like the beginning of something. And in that long stretch between twenty and thirty, and thirty and forty, maybe you’ll secretly wish for a few more ceremonies, a few more commencement speeches, just to give you that permission to start the new chapter. To become more, to start your life, to treat it like it’s real, like these moments matter.

You’ll get tired, and you’ll get discouraged, and you’ll stare yourself down in the mirror and promise to be perfect from now on. You’ll break up, you’ll get divorced, you’ll suffer unbearable disappointments. You’ll pick up again and keep moving. You’ll get fat and you’ll get skinny. You’ll learn languages, and you’ll forget them. You will fall down on the job, and you’ll be ashamed of your weaknesses and your unthinking, exhausted cruelties. You’ll see the patterns in your life taking shape in your children, and you’ll want to warn them to be better, stronger, faster. Quieter. You’ll wish for silence more than anything, and for a moment to sit still in the sun. You’ll beg for the right to feel your actual age, and not like a horrible mistake has been made where you’re suddenly accountable for your own actions. That feeling never goes away. You’ll have as many epiphanies as there are seasons, and some of them will take. Most of them won’t.

You are the evidence and you are the only territory of any of this. You bear every scar, every moment since your birth is an entry in the book. And that book only ever gets longer. You can’t tear out the pages and you can’t burn it up. You can’t edit and you can’t rewrite. You just turn to a new page, and try to do better. And it never ends, and it never gets easier, but if you let it, it can get more and more beautiful. As long as you don’t let your exhaustion get to you, as long as you remember that you always have choices, as long as you’re willing to read the book and see where it’s taking you, as long as you love the book and the sum total of things that have brought you to this place, right now, this very second, you’ll stay afloat. As long as you remember there are no secrets, not really, because it’s all in the book; as long as you remember there is no shame, not really: it’s all in the book already. It’s the best book in the world, and it never ends: it only commences. The point of any commencement speech should be just this very simple, very scary truth that so few of us ever own: The only person writing it is you.”

From the Wall Street Journal: Rejection: Some Colleges Do It Better Than Others

Here, based on my own highly unscientific survey of actual letters, student interviews and message boards, are my picks for this year’s most noteworthy college rejection letters — and the liveliest response by a student.

Toughest: Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Most rejection letters, in an effort to soften the blow, follow a pattern: We’re sorry, we had a huge applicant pool, all our applicants were terrific, we wish we could admit everyone. Bates, a competitive, 1,700-student college, expresses its regrets to rejected applicants and praises its applicant pool. But it delivers a more direct, and perhaps more honest, message: “The deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work at Bates,” the letter says.

The letter touched off a chorus of moans online. One recipient, a 17-year-old high-school student from California, says it “implied that you had been rejected because you s-.” Bates Dean of Admissions Wylie Mitchell acknowledges that he had one applicant “take me to task for such an abrupt letter.” But he says he carefully considered how to convey respect for applicants and decided that brevity is the best route. The letter aims to clarify that Bates is “denying the student’s application, and not rejecting the student,” Mr. Mitchell says. He doesn’t see counseling recipients as the role of college deans.

One of the best historian-created words I’ve seen this year:  “globaloney”

Yes, that is a combination of “global” and “baloney.”