High school seniors, as you sit patiently in caps and gowns waiting for that coveted piece of paper that will allow you to get up and on to what comes next — and I don’t mean the graduation party — it’s important to reflect on your journey of the past 18 years and think about what you know.
To begin, remember and ponder all the sagely advice and direction you’ve received along the way. Specifically, it sounded something like this: Wake up. Pay attention. Listen carefully. Sit still. Write this down. Follow your passion. Or, don’t follow your passion. Develop your skills. See the world. Find your place. Be yourself. Try out new identities. Oh, and drop out of college and start a tech company.
It’s been a virtually endless stream of behavioral commands and bumper-sticker logic. And none of it has really made much of a difference on an individual level, has it? In reality, the best approach is always to take the relevant nuggets of wisdom and ignore the rest.
What you may not recall as you slept through your study of “Hamlet” is the advice from Polonius to his son Laertes after he rattled off an extensive list of suggestions on how to live and then finished by urging his son, “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
It seemed kind of sweet and wise, and in reality it wasn’t at all what a father really wants his teenage son to do. Of course, we should all probably remember from the Spark Notes, or perhaps that awful Mel Gibson movie, that the advice didn’t work out too well for Polonius or Laertes or Hamlet. Yet there is some value in paying attention to our own inner voice.
In that spirit, transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau advised us all to simply “live deliberately.”
We’ve all had those times when we’ve walked across campus or sat through a class or meeting or more frighteningly driven a few miles and then realized we have almost no recollection of it. We zoned out. Well, don’t do that. If I have one bit of useful advice for life, it’s don’t zone out. And, if your life is leading you in a way that causes you to do that, try to make a change.
It’s like when you’re sitting watching television for a while, and someone enters the room and asks what you’re watching, and you honestly haven’t slightest idea. If you’re going to watch TV or take a walk or sit in a class or operate heavy machinery, then by all means don’t do it passively. Do so with deliberate and mindful practice. Pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Don’t live absently.
Regardless of where you go and what you do, don’t let people fence you in. Don’t let the world put boundaries on you. The contemporary world is one of standardization in which society and consumer culture seek to maximize efficiency by making everyone the same. We will all eat at the same restaurants and listen to the same music and watch the same shows and wear the same clothes and study the same subjects and take the same tests. So whenever you can, don’t let people limit you. Because they will if you aren’t living consciously and aren’t paying attention And, don’t limit yourself to any borders, literal or metaphorical. That means not being afraid to go where the job is. Even if that job is selling coffee in the suburbs. Or writing marketing plans in the city. Or working for a non-profit in rural Tennessee. Or teaching English in Taiwan.
The world is becoming increasingly standardized, but the American ethos of a “rugged individuality” and a pioneering spirit was not about sameness. It was, however, about choice. And there may be nothing wrong with consistency and similarity as long as it is conscious and deliberate.
Henry David Thoreau was an original. In fact, he was the original original. And that originality has run throughout American history, from the American Revolution to the culture of punk rock, an ethos nowhere better defined than in the “Punk Rock Manifesto” from Bad Religion front man Greg Graffin, who asserted, “Punk is: a belief that this world is what we make of it, and truth comes from our understanding of the way things are, not from the blind adherence to prescriptions about the way things should be.”
If we approach our lives with that sort of deliberateness and honesty, we will all be in much better shape.
Michael Mazenko is an educator and school administrator. E-mail him at mmazenko@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @mmazenko
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