I was raised, if your heart’s beating, you play.
—Gary Woodland
Dear Members of the Class of 2025,
Several years ago, when I first started my project to help improve education in this country, I wrote a letter to my graduating seniors in the midst of the worst of the pandemic’s lockdowns and posted it for them to read from the isolation of their homes. I spoke a lot about the generative power of truth and the corrosive power of lies, challenging them to build a better world than the one they were inheriting, reminding them that “hope” is a verb, and today, variations on those themes have now featured prominently in every letter I have written to each graduating class ever since. This one will not be an exception.
Part of the reason for that, of course, is because moments of closure in our lives, milestones that mark the end of one journey and the start of another…they just naturally lend themselves to recalling the needs and demands, the ideals that inform every journey. It’s why all commencement addresses fundamentally sound the same: use your potential wisely; pack appropriately for the trip; stop and reflect from time to time; remember to love and be loved; and…here are three life lessons to aid you on your way!
Put simply, these moments of closure remind those of us older than you of similar times in our own lives, and because we care, we just want to provision you with some final wisdom for the road—to prepare you for the occassions of darkness we know inevitably await you. I know. Pretty heavy stuff for such a celebratory occasion. But like my letter to the class of 2020, I find myself writing once more during a time of tremendous turmoil, with a petulant child trying to tear it all down because he never learned how to work and play well with others, and thus, I find myself needing to be a little more overt about those “three life lessons.”
One of which is (and extremely appropriate to our current situation): avoid “magical thinking.” This is the term anthropologists use to refer to ritualistic behaviors done with the intent of somehow modifying something over which one has no actual control (e.g. if we sacrifice this goat, the rumbling volcano will not erupt). But, in today’s broader parlance, it can also refer to thoughts or deeds that simply ignore this lack of control. They can be as harmless as the superstitions behind game-day rituals before a sporting event or as devastating as the delusion that tariffs will cause corporations to abandon their investments to rebuild in the United States. However, the consequence of any magical thinking is always the same: engaging in actions that cannot have any actual bearing on reality.
Not that the actions themselves do not have consequences. The goat is dead; the “lucky” jersey must be washed; markets tumble. But the intent behind the actions remains no less disconnected from their ultimate impact, and it is this intent that can be truly hazardous.
Which leads me to perhaps the most dangerous magical thinking of all (and “life lesson” dos!): the notion of “the Perfect Life.” This is the misbelief that “if I just go to the right school…if I just marry the right person…if I just find the right career…if, if, if…if I just do the right things, then my life will be exactly the way I want it to be.” It is the fantasy that you can achieve a life completely free of frustration, boredom, discomfort, and disappointment, and quite cynically, it is a fantasy that quite a few people make a LOT of money off of—especially today’s social media influencers who try to convince you that if you just follow their lead, buy their product, do as they do, etc. that all will suddenly become bliss. Indeed, an entire medical field exists because of the magical thinking behind the notion of a Perfect Life, earning its practitioners $11.8 billion dollars in 2022 alone—and that’s not including the cosmetic industry itself. All of them, people and companies alike, with the expressed intent of making you feel inadequate about yourself so that they can sell you something.
However, there is no such thing as the Perfect life, never has been and never will be. Moreover, while all of us will engage in the occasional wishful thinking to cope emotionally with life’s finitude—the “if only I can get through this week, then everything will be okay” moments—it is when this wishful thinking turns into magical thinking that we run into trouble. When “if only I…” becomes the sole, primary motivating force in your life, then you condemn yourself to a Sisyphean existence of dismay and defeat. And that’s because there will always be a next “if only I…”—some obstacle to your “final” success, some obstruction to your “ultimate” happiness—and in the meantime, you just wasted who knows how much of your finite time on this planet feeling disappointed, disillusioned, and dyspeptic.
Therefore, do not wait until you are a middle-aged, career-obsessed individual with ulcers to learn not to engage in the magical thinking of the Perfect Life. And along the way, try to avoid Perfect Life’s cousins: “You Can Have It All” and “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be.” No. You cannot. Period. I want each of you to know (as I have written before) that you will have numerous opportunities to do a wide variety of things in this world and that, as an educator, I hope I have helped you begin to decide which of those choices you might finally find yourself investing in one day. But you are a finite organism on a finite planet with a finite lifespan (read The Price of “Pie” if you want to see just how finite), and thus, you will have no choice but to make lasting decisions about how to spend your finitude (remembering that failure to choose is itself a choice). You cannot have it all; you cannot do it all. And you cannot even do everything you wish for; hence, I encourage you to make decisions along your journey that are as thoughtful and informed as they can be (knowing that you will never have all the data) and then invest yourself as best you can, remembering that life is not a “to do” list.
Which brings me to that mandated third “life lesson” required of all commencement moments everywhere: you always have a choice; you just have to be willing to pay the cost. Want to become a neurosurgeon? Then you will give up nearly two decades of training time that won’t be available for family and friends. Want to have children? Then you accept the dozens of years’ worth of financial and emotional burdens required to raise them to adulthood (and often beyond). Want a life partner? Then you need to embrace all the daily compromises that that will demand to make it happen. The simple reality is that free will does not mean freedom from consequences; it simply means that part of any decision is determining whether it is worth the price or not. It can be as simple as choosing to do A rather than B on a weekend afternoon, knowing that B will not get done. Or, it can be as dramatic as quitting a job in protest, knowing that financial insecurity just became your new reality. Regardless, as renowned psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp once put it, “you are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.”
That last line, though, has to be one of the scariest ideas ever because if we join it together with the imperfect nature of our finite lives, we can find ourselves frightened that we are somehow not making the “right kind” of choices—the kinds of choices that are somehow worthy of their consequences. Then we risk trapping ourselves in a vicious cycle of indecision where we put absolute value on each choice as if the very worth of our lives was on the line every time. We risk becoming immobilized in the quest for so-called “best” decisions, and then life really does become “what happens while you’re busy making other plans”—in this case, about your future “best” possible choices.
Of course, this notion of ideal choices is simply another variant of the Perfect Life form of magical thinking, and yet what makes it particularly challenging to avoid is the reality that every choice does actually have a consequence. However, there are consequences and there are CONSEQUENCES, and unless you wish to waste a great deal of that finite life of yours “making plans” instead of living at least a modestly meaningful existence, then learning how to tell the difference is crucial. Because one of the great fallacies (and failures) of our culture is the fact that so many of us seem to believe that we must somehow justify the simple fact that we are alive. Too often, the message we hear is that we have “failed our potential” if we have not fundamentally transformed the world in one fashion or another. Well, reality check: you did not choose to be born; you simply are. In addition, the gut-punch truth is that everyone’s final destination is the same; so the time that you are here is a gift you didn’t—and in fact couldn’t—earn and one that has no claim on you whatsoever.
Which doesn’t mean, as the golfer Gary Woodland suggests, that you don’t play. Yes, from a certain perspective, your entire existence consists only of the consumption of oxygen, the production of carbon dioxide, and the transformation of various organic compounds; you are essentially nothing more than a chemical machine that runs, on average, for 80 years before breaking down and getting recycled into yet another chemical machine. However, from the more nuanced perspective acknowledging both human cognition and agency, you also have the power to have a significant impact on the qualitative experience of all that chemical machinery—both your own and what surrounds you—and you have that power for the better or for the worse. You can, to paraphrase Milton, “make of life a heaven or a hell,” and therefore how you use your finite time does matter; it just doesn’t need to have cosmic importance.
Not that you cannot (nor should not) aspire to have a lasting impact. The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, is correct when he writes that “every society on earth has a leadership class of one sort or another [who need] sensible views about authority so that they don’t childishly rule imperiously from above—[individuals who] embrace the obligations that fall on them as leaders, to serve the country and not their own kind.” Moreover, he is equally correct that if we want a society where everybody flourishes, we are going to need such leadership on steroids to establish better future institutions of governance (assuming we manage to survive the current imbecilic sociopath residing in the White House). Because only when we have leaders who listen to all their fellow citizens, anticipate everyone’s needs, and guide the social change to meet them will we finally find ourselves living in a truly just and equitable society. Maybe some of you are up to the challenge.
I know, that’s a big ask. Right up there with fixing climate change and all the other damage that my fellow elders and I are leaving you to try to repair. What’s more, anyone who has ever constructed anything—a Lego model, a theater set, a curriculum, even a meal—knows firsthand how much harder it is to build than to tear down. But that’s why—again!—it is SO important not to engage in magical thinking. When there is so much that needs fixing (and some of the repairs are truly global!), you can easily find yourself at times feeling cognitively overwhelmed and fatigued to the point of paralysis. This is especially true in today’s 24/7 digital—for which modern psychology even has a term. It’s called “compassion fatigue,” and it can make taking any sort of action seem pointless.
However, as author and journalist, Oliver Burkeman, points out, the solution to compassion fatigue is both ridiculously simple and yet incredibly challenging (for fear of the judgement of others): embrace your finitude and pick your battles; choose which change you will seek to be and let the rest go, trusting that others will choose different battles than yours. Indeed, one could argue that “in [our] age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight” (p. 36) and then giving those battles what you can.
And before you think giving what you can cannot possibly be enough to have an actual impact, I will share a small piece of my own journey. Most reading this will know that I commute to work by walking and have done so now for nearly 30 years. Well, there is an exercise I have one of my senior classes do where they calculate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air from burning fossil fuels, and on a whim, I did the calculations with them a little over a year ago on how much CO2 my decision to walk rather than drive has kept out of the atmosphere. Turns out the answer is a little over 30 metric tons, which is the equivalent of 9 football fields worth of forest. Or to make that a visual many people reading this can understand, it is the equivalent of growing or preserving a forest occupying the entire campus of Friends School of Baltimore. Thus, never doubt your individual power to effect positive change. Even the smallest of decisions, enacted consistently can have profound impacts.
But that brings me to a point I try to make each year, and that is to be graceful with one another. Each of you will make mistakes along your journey, mistakes that will impact others, including people you love. You will bruise and be bruised because sin is real. Yet, you have the power for compassion—to forgive yourself as well as others—and with it, you therefore have the power to restore wholeness in a broken world—the employment of which is the ultimate form of hope.
So let me leave you here with a small bit of wisdom I have passed on before, an idea in Zen Buddhism known as “Mu.” “Mu” is the understanding that sometimes when we find ourselves with an intractable problem, that perhaps we are not asking the right question(s). Thus, a Zen master will regularly tell a struggling disciple, “Mu”—you need a different perspective. Therefore, I share this concept of “Mu” with you because as you make your finite choices about your finite life, deciding which consequences to pay and which limited battles to fight, you will regularly find yourself very humanly second-guessing yourself. And in those moments, my permanent advice to you will always be, “Mu.”
Congratulations and best of luck!
References
Brooks, D. (Feb. 27, 2025) We Can Achieve Great Things. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/opinion/government-great-progressive-abundance.html.
Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Milton, J. (1667) Paradise Lost (available in multiple formats)
Light a Candle 