About 50 years after my high school graduation back in New York, I read some of the best advice I know for those embarking on something new and unchartered. I’ll get to more about that best advice a bit later. In the meantime…
I graduated in the 1960s, a time of war and rumors of war and of racial unrest and injustice, a time of protests and movements and inhumanity. It also was a time of goodness and integrity, courage and helpfulness, love, flowers and cures and hard-won freedoms. It was a time of fun and dreams.
In that regard, it was a time like any other, like now, for example. The world today, minus the gadgets and the speed of communications, is very like that of the 1960s. It is filled with opportunity and hope and fraught with danger and peril. The music was better back then.
Fifty or so years from now you’ll have a lot of life experience to help you figure out the past, deal with the present and plan the future. If you live that long. Some of you will not. Disease will take you, an auto accident, crime or act of nature will steal you, or a war will cut your life short and rob you of your future.
As graduates, you are as prepared as you have prepared yourself to be—no more no less. You peer into your future with hope and dreams. Safeguard both, lose neither.
Be open to advice. Once given, it belongs to you to heed or not. Make good decisions.
That best advice I mentioned earlier cannot come too soon or too late.
It is from an author, writer and thinker I admire and in whose work are found pardons, pledges and paths. He is Steven Pressfield, the author of many works including a wonderful golf saga titled, “The Legend of Bagger Vance.” He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and is highly regarded by the military because much of his writing speaks to what he calls the warrior ethos. It’s good stuff.
Pressfield’s work applies to all of us. In his little book, Do The Work!, Chapter One is called, “Beginning.”
You are at a beginning, so you should read the book. Here, in part, is what he advises:
“Don’t prepare. Begin. Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.
“The enemy is Resistance (things that try to stop us from advancing). The enemy is our chattering brain which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.”
Pressfield also urges us to, “Start before you’re ready. Good things happen when we start before we’re ready. For one thing we show huevos. Our blood heats up. Courage begets more courage. The gods, witnessing our boldness, look on in approval. W.H. Murray said…‘I have learned a deep respect for Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.’”
Pressfield also writes, “When you or I set out to create anything—art, commerce, science, love—or to advance in the direction of a higher, nobler version of ourselves, we uncork from the universe…an equal and opposite reaction.” He continues on:
“That reaction is Resistance… an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals.
“The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile.” That’s a tough one to swallow.
If it sounds negative and harsh, I suggest it is not. It’s real life. Fifty years from my high school graduation, nearer the end of my life than to it’s beginning, I believe it is a fair and honest assessment of our time here.
If you are very lucky, you will not encounter any of that hostility, or it will visit infrequently and you will be able to conquer it and move on and life will be good.
Either way, it is out there, along with all the goodness, love, wonder and dreams come true in the years to come.
Best of luck; may your life be a good one that makes the world a better place.
Jack Foley graduated from high school in 1965 and has watched his four children graduate.
