I’m giving this speech at a ceremony today for some college grads, honor society initiates. I think it’s mostly done, which is good because it starts in an hour.
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I’m delighted and grateful to be here with you today. I was told that there was no possible chance that I could have received this honor when I was at Lewis & Clark; and then it was quickly clarified that this was because this chapter of Phi Beta Kappa didn’t yet exist in 1994. We’ll just leave it at that and not look at my record with any more scrutiny. I’m just pleased to have this rare opportunity to be among all of you.
It’s awkward, though, isn’t it?
It was exactly 25 years ago when I graduated with my physics degree. And so here I am now, looking at you and feeling like I am your peer, even though you are younger than my diploma. And just as I’m looking at you imagining that we are somehow comrades in this ceremony, you are looking at me as some astonishing Dickens-like ghost of your future, a cautionary tale of some possible fate that you’d either like to deny or cannot fathom. I’m sorry for this.
And yet I still relate to and palatably know the experience of spending hours in the basement of Olin or studying late in the library or even first moving into Copeland — as well as so many other things that are probably best left not described here at an auspicious event in front of parents and professors. I still can feel myself walking the graduation processional, readied with my budding expertise in physics and a bound thesis on Raleigh-Bénard convection cells. (If you don’t know what these are, it’s okay. No one else does, either.)
I know that you are going to hear lots of advice from uncles and commencement speakers and mothers. They will quote wisdom of Maya Angelou and Shel Silverstein and Miles Davis and Steve Jobs, all for good reason and to good effect. But I hate advice. Instead, I want to congratulate you on all of your accomplishments and your hard work, and I’ll say again that I’m so very proud to be among you. Now I only wish for you the opportunity to try something else: Try failure. Missteps. Wrong turns. Catastrophe.
Perhaps I should explain.
When I left Lewis & Clark (clearly without having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa) I left for a stint as a PhD student in Physics. I was well-prepared to do research in condensed matter physics; and I had an assistantship, mentors, and a clear trajectory. But very soon after I started working as a teaching assistant, I had an epiphany that turned into crisis: Even though physics will always be my first love, I became even more enthralled with research in education. While it’s great to find a passion, it’s a terribly painful thing to realize you’re in the wrong program, especially if that program has committed to pay for your schooling in what you’d thought was your life’s work.
Within this much longer story, the important plot points are that I was in complete personal crisis because all I knew about myself was shaken and everything I’d prepared for had just fallen out from under me. The resolution of the story involved migrations back and forth across campus to do research with scholars in science education while I kept myself indispensable as an instructor on the physics side of campus. It turns out it’s not much harder to get two graduate degrees than it is to get one — if you can do one practically impossible thing, it’s not that much more impossible to do it twice. Within that timeframe I also got married and just as I was finishing data collection for my dissertation, we had our first daughter, Anna. (Sidenote: On Tuesday I’m picking her up after her own first year of college.)
Much more important than this crisis or the outcome is the reason it worked out. A very large part of it was really fortunate, dumb luck. Only a very small part of it was my physics degree from Lewis & Clark, even though I use physics literally every day of my life, making sure future doctors and teachers understand this stuff. Most critically, my solutions were hidden in all the other small tentacles that brought my education together. There was a fiction writing course where I’d learned how to craft narrative and understand characters. I had been transformed by studies of culture permeating the New Testament and the Vietnam War. I had lessons in jazz piano that almost certainly set the stage for my marriage of 24 years. I had lived with people from other countries. I took Acting I my last term of my last year of college, and I now claim that this was the most useful curriculum of my career, something that shapes my teaching to this day. And even in Calculus, where I learned integration by parts (which is obviously useful), I also was permanently affected by John Krussel’s unapologetic placement of a poem on each exam, which opened a new door for me and is a practice that I emulate on all of my own physics exams. In all this and so much more, I had something else besides a physics degree that I didn’t realize. It was a capacity for diverse realms of thought and openness to new possibilities. In so many ways, my crisis in graduate school was actually caused by a liberal arts education. Lewis & Clark created in me a disaster waiting and ready to happen. And I’m better for it.
So, I just wanted to warn you. Embrace your upcoming and inevitable catastrophes because you are ready for them. You don’t know what form they will take, but they will find you. Know this and greet your own crisis with a knowing nod.
At the same time, welcome uncertainties not just because you’re ready and it’s good for you, but because we all need you to. The world is awash in inequity and denial, and there is no simple fix. We aren’t going to solve these with the tried and true, straight and narrow success strategies we’re accustomed to. We need something different, something radical, and something that is clearly, most probably, destined to fail. Try all the possibilities, because we have no other option and no patience to wait on others.
But most of all, embrace all of your life’s impending failures and struggles not because they are character building or useful or any kind of progressive step towards something else, but because they are themselves wonderful and beautiful. I now get to teach physics, study learning, conspire with artists, and reform science education (and I still play jazz piano). My wrong turns made my life my own, and my experience all the richer. So as I offer congratulations to you, I also wish you all, my fellow initiates, your own very most spectacular disasters and missteps yet to come.
