Good
evening class of 2016. And congratulations. Here we are--After 13 years,
thousands of class hours, and hundreds of valuable formative home learning
experiences all that stands between you and graduation are two more speeches
and 45 minutes of administrators reading out names. Then you are out of here:
done with school, done with tardy slips and 7:50 am classes, done with dress
code and the unexpected reintroduction of detention. Done with required courses
and constant supervision; off to the unadulterated freedom of adult life with
its near total personal control of one’s own sleep schedule, dietary choices,
and screen time limits. No more pencils/ no more books/ no more teachers’ dirty
looks, etc. etc.
But
wait, wait, all of that is wrong. Popular, I’ll give you that, but wrong. You
see, this is just the story we tell ourselves about graduation. It is a story
of escape: escape from the repressive strictures of childhood and into the
fulfillment and self-determination of adult life. Finally done with childhood,
we imagine, you can now move forward with your real life. It’s a great story of
growing up: the young kid escaping from a provincial life, with its restrictive
and sometimes immoral rules, and striking out on her own to discover who she really
is. It’s the story of Jay Gatz leaving
behind North Dakota poverty to remake himself in New York; it is the story of Huckleberry Finn leaving behind a small,
racist world to light out for the territory. This story of growing up as escape
is the story of Easy Rider and,
indeed, of the movie The Graduate
itself. It’s Star Wars Episode 4,
it’s The Wizard of Oz, and I am
pretty sure it’s The Unbreakable Kimmy
Schmidt.
And
this isn’t just a fictional story, either. For, if the literary historian
Richard Chase is to be believed, this is the
story of America itself. It is the story of Pilgrims escaping a corrupt and
restrictive church of England to found a new nation; it is the story of brave
pioneers leaving fetid eastern cities to make new lives on the open plains; the
story of African Americans fleeing Jim Crow to create in Harlem a new culture
that would change the world. This is the story America tells about itself, and
it is a great one--a story of escape, of self-realization, and of adventure.
But
it’s all wrong for graduation. It’s all wrong because it gets growing up all
wrong. It would be cool if adulthood was a process of increasing freedom but,
in fact, that just isn’t the case. Rather, growing up, at least when it works
well, is a journey not toward freedom but toward greater entanglement. If you
live the fulfilled lives that I hope you do, far from escaping into total
individual freedom you will find yourself taking on bigger tasks, shouldering
greater responsibilities in more complex organizations. Many of you will
voluntarily commit yourselves to professions like law, medicine, and education
that treat their duties as almost religious obligations, complete with
elaborate and medieval ceremonies of investiture, like this one. You will find
yourself bound into a more complex web of familial and personal relationships,
many of them extraordinarily demanding of your time and restrictive of your
freedom. Indeed, some day many of you will find the greatest joy of your lives
in the act of becoming parents, an act so devastating to basic human freedom
that you may find yourself one day, a grown man responding to the repeated
imperative “Daddy, Daddy,” with the pitiful whisper, “Can I just have 90
seconds to myself to use the bathroom?”
And
those commitments will make for wonderful lives. For, I think, fulfillment
comes from entanglement rather than escape. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks once put it, “Life comes to a point only in those moments when
the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself.
It’s to lose yourself.”
But that doesn’t make for a very good story. It’s
certainly no Gatsby.
So let me try a story that gets closer to the truth.
It’s a story of departure and adventure, but one with a different sense of what
an adventure can be like.
Many of you will know that the first two humans to
walk on the moon were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And many of you will also
know that there was a third member of that Apollo 11 mission: Michael Collins.
Collins’ story, though, is less often told, because the Apollo spacecraft were
designed such that while two astronauts, the ones surely to be remembered for
centuries to come, descended to the moon’s surface in the lunar lander, a third
stayed behind, orbiting the moon in the Command Module. That third person on
Apollo 11 was Michael Collins.
On July 20, 1969, after a 3-day trip from the earth
to the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar lander. They separated from
the command module and began their descent to the surface of the moon, taking
with them the attention of the world and leaving Collins alone in the command
module above.
Immediately things went wrong. Communication
between the lunar lander and mission control back in Houston was terrible. You
can listen to this on youtube and hear that neither party could make out at all
what the other was saying--a considerable problem just minutes away from one of
the most difficult technical feats ever accomplished by humans. Collins found
himself taking on a mission that was nowhere in the flight plan, relaying
instructions back and forth from Houston to the lander and trying to figure out
how to reconfigure antennae in the meantime. But Collins knew his ship like the
back of his hand, and he made it work. The lunar lander continued its descent
and, after some of the most dramatic moments in the history of human travel,
landed on the moon with 17 seconds of fuel to spare.
Now here is the cool part. As Armstrong and Aldrin
descended to the lunar surface, Collins continued his orbit around the moon and
vanished. With his sightlines to both earth and the lunar landar gone, Collins
was alone. On the dark side of the moon, it was literally impossible for
Collins to make contact with any other human being in the universe. As he put
it in his memoir, “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from
any known life. I am it” (Collines 402). As Apollo XIII commander Jim Lovell
explains in his autobiography, NASA trained its mission controllers to prepare
for most any disaster when the orbiting command module reappeared on the other
side of the moon. The astronaut could be dead, the ship exploded, the life
support systems gone--there was no way to know if any of that had happened, and
no way to help if it had (Lovell 84-86). NASA flight director Chris Kraft
would describe the 20 minutes the spacecraft spent behind the moon as “the most
apprehensive time in my life” (When We Left Earth Part 3 16:20).
All Mission Control could do was wait; whatever came up, Collins would have to
handle it on his own.
But here is the thing. Collins describes these
moments of total isolation on the dark side of the moon not in terms of danger
or stress, but in terms of confidence: “I don’t mean to deny a feeling of
solitude,” he said. “I feel this powerfully--not as fear or loneliness--but as
awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation” (Collins
402).
And, indeed, Collins displayed not one ounce of
panic. He handled his mission brilliantly, handled brilliantly the unexpected
tasks he was handed, recovered Armstrong and Aldrin exactly on schedule and,
fulfilling the last clause of President Kennedy’s famous challenge, returned
them safely to earth.
This is the story I want you to think about as you
walk out of here tonight. It is a story of departure, yes, and of adventure.
But it is not a story of escape. No, no--it is a story of entanglement. Collins
didn’t accomplish what he did because he escaped his past; he accomplished what
he did by building on a life’s worth of acquired skills. He did it not by
fleeing the restrictions of institutions but by enmeshing himself in an
institution whose employees numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He did it by
learning the intricacies of a ship built by a thousand engineers, mechanics,
and pilots. His is a story of singular success achieved not through escape, but
through preparation and teamwork.
So get out of here, graduates. Get out of here and explore
the stars. Know that you are going to be given duties you didn’t train for and
tasks you have never practiced. But know also that you’ve got the skills to
handle them; you are prepared. We wouldn’t send you out there if you weren’t.
Know that sometimes you are going to feel as lonely as Michael Collins when he
passed behind the moon, like you are a quarter million miles from home and
there is no one you can call for help. But know also that if you can just hang
on for 20 minutes, your orbit will bring you back around, and, when you do, you
will find thousands of us back here in Houston, ready to help. We won’t be able
to complete the job for you, but we will be able to talk you through it, to let
you know your position and velocity, to tell you if you are a bit off course
and how to correct.
So leave here knowing that you are ready for this.
Get out there, explore the stars, and then come back home and tell us what it
looks like out there on the far side of the moon.
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