Ultimately, All We Have Are Our Stories

Ultimately, All We Have Are Our Stories

May 14, 2016

Warren G. Frisina

Good evening. Thank you for joining us for this celebration tonight. It’s such a gift to be with our graduating students one last time before we officially close the door on your undergraduate experience.

This is my annual graduation speech. I write one each year for this occasion because I believe you deserve one last C&E lecture. No, not really. I actually write these talks because I’ve always felt that after putting your heart and soul into preparing for final exams, writing senior honors theses and tidying up whatever it took to guarantee that you will actually receive your degree tomorrow, someone on our side should be asked to make a reciprocating effort. In a way then, this graduation speech is an assignment you give to me. And, just like you, I’m typically up late the night before it’s due wrestling with how to put

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what is in my heart on paper so that I can make you understand how proud and excited we are for you and for your families.

There are few moments in life as lovely as graduation. Sure, it can be scary. Some of you are already preoccupied with worries about what comes next. To combat such negative energy, I offer my first bit of advice. Pretty much everywhere these days you can hear business executives, life coaches, and random people on the street throwing around the term “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is derived from centuries of Buddhist practice. It counsels us to put aside regrets from the past and worries about the future so we can observe and be fully present in what is happening here and now. These mindfulness gurus are suggesting we need to train ourselves to exist “in the moment” to squeeze the most out of life. Well, if ever there were a moment to fully occupy all of your attention, graduation weekend is it. Let’s savor it for as long as it lasts. Let’s appreciate what you have done, and let’s appreciate what others have done for you. Because while this achievement is certainly yours, it also belongs to your parents, families

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and friends. It also belongs to your Hofstra teachers, staff and administrators. We all believed in you, we worked hard on your behalf, and as you can see, our faith in you was well placed!

You all look so wonderful tonight. You’ve always been beautiful, of course. We’ve known that from the first time we saw you peeking at us from furrowed brows at admissions events when you were just 17 or so. At the time you were looking at us side eyed as if you were uncertain whether to trust the stories we told of how at Hofstra you would find friends, discover ideas, and emerge from that protective chrysalis which you now refer to as your old “high school self.”

What I’d like you to notice tonight is that we introduced you to Hofstra and HUHC by telling you stories. We told you the story of HUHC itself. We told stories about current HUHC students and alumni.

Each story was meant to shape your first impression of who we are and what we have to offer. In fact, listening to and telling stories is pretty much the only thing we do in HUHC. Sure, we have some bureaucratic responsibilities. There’s paperwork to file and email reminders about

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events to come [Admit it: you are going to miss all those HUHC emails, right?]. But most of what we do in HUHC is tell, retell and refine stories that are designed to help us make sense of well, “YOU.” By you I mean the collective you (i.e. all HUHC students) but also you as individuals.

And we are constantly trying to figure you out. We would see you in class, across campus, or on an HUHC couch drinking our coffee and wonder: How is she doing with that project? Or Where is he heading with that double major in physics and creative writing? Yes, while you thought you were walking around anonymously, we were watching, and telling ourselves stories about how we thought you were doing.

We were also listening to your stories. Sometimes they were heartbreaking, involving great loss and disappointment. Other times, they were joyously filled with wonderful moments of self‐discovery and achievement.

Now, “storytelling” is sometimes given a bad rap. People will respond to a story by saying “That’s JUST a story.” Or they will demand to know whether a story is “based in fact” or just “made up.” But what

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I’d like you to realize as you leave us and head into the “so called real world” is that ultimately all we have are our stories. Sure, there are facts, hard bits of information which we gather through experience or science. But none of those facts makes sense on their own. We only understand them when we put them inside a story.

Let me give you an example. We were visited this year by Professor Laura Otis of Emory University. She used to teach at Hofstra and when she was with us she wrote a book1 that examined the way 19th century scientists first made sense of the human nervous system.

These scientists had mountains of data, facts about how the body responds to various stimuli. But none of it made any sense to them.

They couldn’t describe how the system worked, until, the advent of the telegraph system. That sounds crazy right? What does the telegraph system have to do with the human nervous system? Through a close analysis of these scientists’ writings, their lab notes, letters, journals

1 Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

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and other informal documents, Professor Otis shows how our current understanding of nerves, the brain and the body emerged only after these scientists recognized that the telegraph system, which uses electrical impulses to communicate information across great distances, could serve as a primary metaphor for the nervous system. Can you see what happened? These scientists couldn’t tell a coherent story about the facts they had collected until after latching onto a useful metaphor. It wasn’t that they lacked information. They didn’t need more facts. What they needed was a way to assemble those facts into a story that made sense.

Now I tell you this “story” for a couple of reasons. First of all I want you to notice how foolish it is to ask whether the story linking nerves and telegraph wires is “true.” Of course it’s true, but not the way people sometimes mean. Human nerves are not telegraph wires.

It is true, however, that by recognizing how nerves are like telephone wires it became possible to tell a story about the human body which is true. How do I know their story is true? Because their story has done

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so much to make sense of how our brain and body interact with the world.

This brings me to the second reason for telling you this story. For the most part, the only thing that counts when it comes to storytelling is whether a story helps you to make sense of things. We treat stories as “true” when they give meaning and order to our lives. Fictional storytelling is always untrue from the point of view of what actually happens in the world, but when it’s a good story it opens us to truths about ourselves that we can’t access any other way. The same can be said about the stories we tell about events in our lives. The events themselves are the facts. Our stories are what organizes those facts into something that makes sense of who we are and where we are heading.

OK so by now you are starting to wonder what does all this talk of stories, storytelling and truth have to do with my graduation? In fact, you are getting worried that I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to give you one last C&E lecture. Well here’s the point:

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All of us awake to discover we are emerging patterns within an unfinished network of stories. Our lives consist of so many layered narrative lines that have been initiated by others that it’s hard to see where our stories end and someone else’s begin. In fact, when you think about it this way none of our stories are ever really single authored tales. When we tell stories we are always picking up the threads of the tales around us and weaving them into something new, something that makes sense only from our perspective I can illustrate this. If I were to ask you to “make sense of your Hofstra years” how would you do it? Well, you might point to the knowledge acquired, or the skills you picked up. You might start to explain how your degree set you up for a new job or graduate school.

But if you were really trying to make sense of what happened here you’d tell of the time when during your first weeks you thought you’d never have a group of friends as good as those you had in high school, and how eventually you realized you were wrong. Or, you’d describe the crazy time after midnight when you and several people you hardly

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knew decided that the night could not end without a visit to a nearby diner, where you did little more than eat burgers and goof around. Or, you’d tell the tale of how your best friend showed up at your door one afternoon with news that she’d just lost a loved one. Or you’d talk about the night you were brave enough to sing before all your friends (and a few Deans) at an HUHC open mic night, and everyone applauded. Or you’d describe what it was like to travel with the Quidditch or Ultimate teams. Or, you might tell the story of the professor who didn’t give you an extension on the paper but who sat with you for an hour and a half helping you to understand better what it was you wanted to say.

It would be easy to go on. Right now, your mind is already tracking dozens of your own Hofstra stories that explain how you got to where you are, and that can give us a window into where you might be heading. And all of those stories involve weaving your life into some kind of meaningful relationship with the lives of others.

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Ultimately, all we have are our stories. For a good many years after Hofstra you will work hard and if you are lucky you’ll enjoy life and perhaps even acquire some material possessions along the way. But as I wrap this up I’d like to ask you to engage in a somewhat difficult exercise of the imagination. Project yourself forward some 70 or 80 years. Imagine you are now approaching the end of a long and lucky life. What will you have that makes the most sense out of who you are and what you have done. It won’t be the possessions. You may have many or you may have few. It won’t be career accomplishments. I know this is hard to believe but trust me on this one. Actually, you don’t have to trust me, just spend some time talking with anyone who is for reasons of age or health facing the end of their story. If you listen carefully, and you should, you’ll notice the way they light up when the stories they tell veer away from achievements and towards their relationships.

Four and a half years ago, when you were looking at us side eyed during those admissions events we told you stories about what your life

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at Hofstra would be like. We promised that our stories would become yours, that you would find friends, that you would discover new ideas, and that you’d leave us with tales to tell. Looking across this room tonight I know I can be happy in the knowledge that we’ve made good on our promises. I can also look forward to many, many years when you return to swap stories with us and your friends about your Hofstra years and all that unfolds afterwards. Thank you for sharing these years with us. Please remember to stay in touch.