2019 Commencement
Not your typical “new year, new me” speech.
This year, give up invalidating yourself. Relating to yourself as incapable. Making yourself wrong. Give up resisting the parts of yourself you don’t like, for when you resist the rapids, you get hurled into stones. Instead, celebrate them. For what’s celebrated is acknowledged, and what’s acknowledged is heard, and what’s heard becomes quiet.
Take what you get, and create space for it. All things need room to grow. The quality of your life is correlated to the allowance you make for all that life offers to be in your life. The resistance, the kicking and screaming, creates the problems. Keep expanding your willingness to take what life gives you. Expanding your ability to be with your current circumstances and see them as magnificent. As perfect. As missing nothing. Suspend the “buts” about your life, and simply let it be the way it is. Give it room. Let it breathe. Give up navigating the territory against the noise of the map. Sure, look at the map, but remain present in the territory. And when the territory calls for it, be willing to call the map what it is — a map. Not the territory.
This year, give up making others wrong, as invalidating others is merely us looking at the things about ourselves which we refuse to deal with. Make room for their expression, and select it, as if you drew it up this way. Consider they’re exactly who you dreamed they would be and more, short of just shaking loose a few ropes or chains — in other words, your invalidations, doubts, and make-wrongs (or, more likely, their own). Consider the way they are is a constrained, boxed-in, imprisoned version of who they are, really. And your willingness to be with the way they are creates the space for them to break loose and show up for you as someone unrecognizable.
I promise you, you seeing yourself and your life as magnificent exactly the way it is, as a matter of cosmic, scientific or spiritual phenomenon (whatever you believe), and allowing yourself to be touched by that — free from comparison or regret — I promise you that alacrity and that admiration will be more than enough water for the garden to push forth the growth that finally, really represents the fullest expression of yourself.
“Bequeathed with creation’s yearning
May we each dig deep
till the courage is found
(for the sake of the lure of living the rest of our days in that house of immeasurable being)
To take it and be.”
— E.E. Cummings
