Commencement 2011 “Keep listening, leave room for the quiet. Take a walk each day and study the curves in the path.” —Reif Larsen ’98
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ne of the reasons why addressing you on this day of days is such an utter privilege is that I know what a brilliant, diverse, engaged, curious bunch of people you are. I have talked to your teachers. I have talked to some of you. I have heard the stories. Graduations are so momentous not just because of what has been achieved today but because of the accumulation of what will be achieved in the future. Look around you, seniors. Your classmates will go on to study and unravel the human genome, to write novels and hilarious television shows, to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court, to find new and miraculous ways to keep the kitty litter inside the kitty litter box. We look at you, seniors, and we see a world that will change because of you. (No pressure or anything.) But you graduate into an increasingly complex world in which you are constantly being bombarded with distractions, each piece of media begging for that last ounce of your precious attention. Over the course of my brief life, I have witnessed the rise of myriad technologies designed to simplify our lives, to entertain us, to bring us closer together. Email was just becoming popular when I first arrived at Milton. No one had a cell phone. Text messaging did not even exist. Now we send almost five billion text messages to each other every single day. I am not going to stand up here and say, “I remember when we used to write letters and everyone spoke like Abraham Lincoln and soda cost a nickel.” No, I’m not going to do this because soda did not cost a nickel, and this kind of nostalgic hand-wringing gets us nowhere. But what I will say is that Milton has done an amazing job of preparing you for this world of media saturation because it has taught you what I believe to be the single most critical skill one can have in life: the ability to listen. You were lucky enough to have great teachers here,
woods. I try not to bring along my headphones. I reach for them, but then I put them away. This is because I want to leave room for my brain to marinate on what I’ve just written. And as I walk through the woods, I start to make these connections between previously disparate ideas, and I begin to realize what it was I was trying to write in the first place. But this process cannot be rushed. We all know that feeling of sitting down to write a paper and not knowing what it is we’re trying to say. Well, figuring out what you want to say takes time. As our lives fi ll up with business, with texting and twittering and commentary about the commentary, the first things to go are these subtle moments of reflective quiet, because their fruits are often not apparent in the short term. But they are critical. So this is my first piece of advice: Keep listening, leave room for the quiet. Take a walk each day and study the curves in the path. Reif Larsen, Class of 1998
and great teachers are defined by their ability to listen, react, adjust, respond to their students. Teachers are hero listeners. But in this world, even the ability to listen to others is not enough. Milton has given you something even more important, even more intimate than this: the ability to listen to one’s self. For example, in my own life, a life in which I attempt to conjure novels about things I know little to nothing about, such as growing up in colonial Cambodia or surviving WWII in arctic Norway, I spend my mornings writing, sitting in my chair for hours. There are no secrets to writing novels, only time and persistence and a little more time. And while showing up each day is important, I believe the most critical part of my day isn’t even the time I spend in the chair. It is in the afternoon, after I leave my office. Every day I go for a jog or sometimes a walk with my dog through the
The whole “walk a day” thing, however, might prove a little tricky, because your lives are about to change drastically: Many of you are off to college in the fall. Some of you are wisely taking a year off to go find yourself, and some of you are building a high-tech flying suit of metal so as to fight crime and flirt with Gwyneth Paltrow. Hold on…what? Oh, that was the movie I just saw last night... Anyway, I am excited for all of you. Freshman year in college is an amazing, eye-opening, very busy time, a time of realizing the only really important rules are the ones that you set for yourself. Many of you have already made some plans of what you want to study in college. And this is all fine and dandy. We like plans. But don’t plan too hard. Leave room to be surprised. This is a good rule of thumb. Excerpted from the speech that author Reif Larsen ’98 delivered to the graduating Class of 2011 at their commencement on June 10, 2011.
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