Recently I had the great thrill of receiving an honorary degree, so I stayed up all night before, drafting a speech for commencement day. I tried to write something meaningful and profound, because you can’t joke around in a commencement speech. It calls for loftier sentiments, and though I’m not incapable of same, I love to get laughs.
I was aiming for meaningful laughs.
In other words, every draft came out terrible.
I was up until dawn, fussing over 1500 words, which is crazy. It should have been easy. I can sneeze 1500 words. But go-out-and-change-the-world stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. I hate to put that kind of pressure on people. Why isn’t it good enough to live a decent life? For me, it is. If I can parallel park, I’m doing good.
Also, I was getting bollixed up by the fact that I had heard J. K. Rowling deliver the best commencement speech ever, and she outsells me 8,376,373,838 books to one. So I was having a major case of performance anxiety by the morning, even after I had drafted a generic go-change-the-world speech. I went downstairs to make a pot of coffee and a white light bulb went off in my head.
Literally.
And not in a good way.
There was a white flash of light, but no idea came to me. I blinked again, and my eyes didn’t seem to clear. All I could see were bright prisms of colors, like looking out of a kaleidoscope.
I covered one eye and then the other, but all I could see were fragmented rainbows. I thought I was imagining it and went to look in the mirror, where I saw my own eyes staring back from wacky shards of color.
I had become a Cubist painting.
It wasn’t a good look, for a single girl.
I went back up to the computer, logged into WebMD, and read through my colorful prisms, learning the symptoms of the various eye diseases. I determined that I didn’t have macular degeneration or a detached retina, but the kaleidoscopes weren’t clearing. I remained calm because there weren’t a lot of other choices. Forty-five colorful minutes later, I was considering driving to the emergency room, through what would undoubtedly look like a psychedelic tunnel.
But the whole time I was thinking, what if I went blind? If I had a choice, which sense would I give up?
Sight would not be my first choice, though I have come to meet many wonderful people who have coped so well with their blindness. I’m also partial to smelling things, like lilacs and spaghetti sauce, which I love, or dog breath, which I love even more. And I’ve gotten used to hearing things, though I’d give up the sense of taste in a minute. Then everything would taste like tofu, and I’d lose weight.
But seriously, what would it be like if something I had taken for granted, like my eyesight, was suddenly taken away?
I sat there in my very vibrant haze and realized that tons of people go through this hardship, every day. They get a diagnosis that takes their sight, or their hearing, or their very life.
Just like that.
And my eyes suddenly cleared. No joke. The prisms dropped away, leaving me with a clear view of my computer and a dull headache. In time I called a doctor and found out I had experienced an ocular migraine, which can be brought on by lack of sleep over a 1500-word speech. But the good news was that because of my ocular excitement, I knew which 1500 words to write.
I threw out the change-the-world draft and wrote instead that the graduates should live in the moment. That they don’t know how many moments are allotted to them, in this, their one and only life. That all of the blessings of this earth-as well as their very senses and the regular beat of their heart-aren’t guaranteed to anyone. That interviewers will ask them where they think they’ll be in five years, but life isn’t to be lived in five-year stretches.
Life is moments.
And smells, and tastes, and the sight of your daughter’s face. Or the sound of a kitten’s purr.
So the only time is now.
That they call it commencement day because it’s the beginning of life after college. But the real truth is, every day of life is commencement day.
Every day is a new day in which we wake up and choose how to live. Whether it’s to apply for a job or to ask somebody out on a date. Or buy a sweater or save for a car. Or sell your house and find a better one. Or fall in love. That we choose every action in every day of our lives.
And I told them, and myself, to rejoice in the first of this string of commencement days. We don’t have to know what’s next. We shouldn’t think about next now. Be right where you are, in the present, in this moment.
Your moment.
Just be. And see and hear and smell. Because we are all of us so very lucky to begin again, every day.
Happy Commencement Day today.
And tomorrow, too.