This message is from a commencement speech made by a Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen, at Villanova University.
Lilies Of The Field
— By Anna Quindlen
I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.
Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work.
You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no
one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same
degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for
a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of
your life.
Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk,
or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the
life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account
but your soul.
People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much
easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold
comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or
when you’ve gotten back the test results and they’re not so good.
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried
never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I
no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I
listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to
make marriage vows mean what they say.
I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there
would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard
cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I
would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were
not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is
all you are.
So here’s what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life,
not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the
larger house.
Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you blew
an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in
which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze
over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed
hawk circles over the water or the way a baby scowls with concentration
when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love
you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the
phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter.
Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the
best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care
so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take
money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a
soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.
All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing
well will never be enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes.
It is so easy to take for granted the color of our wife’s eyes, the way
the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.
It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned to live many
years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned
that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you
get.
I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some
of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried
to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling
them this:
Consider the lilies of the field. Look lovingly at your partner.
Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And
think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it
with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.
