I've been having such a tough time this past spring semester -- I've been sick basically since mid-March, and it has affected my work, my writing and my personal life in ways I never even thought possible. Wonderful, good things have also happened, and I'm trying to remember that and not let the bad define everything. In pursuit of that, I dug up this commencement speech that a friend of mine passed on to me 10 years ago, when I was just a wee young speechwriter for a politician in Tennessee. I find this helps me focus my energy right now:
(Delivered by N. Hobbs, May 1968, as a commencement address at the Peabody Demonstration School, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN)
Life is highly problematic and what you become will rest in no small measure on the kinds of problem situations you get yourself into and have to work yourself out of. It is exceedingly difficult for a person to take thought and alter the quality of character and direction in his life. However, he can choose the direction he would like his life to take and then put himself deliberately in situations that will require the evolution of himself toward the kind of person he would like to become.
It is deep in the nature of man to make problems for himself. Man has often been called the problem-solver, but he is even more the problem-maker. Every noble achievement of men -- in government, art, architecture, literature, and above all, in service -- represents a new synthesis of the human experience, deepening our understanding and enriching our spirit. But each solid noble achievement creates new problems, often of unexpected dimension, and man moves eagerly on to face these new perplexities and to impose his order upon them. And so it will be, world without end. To know a person, it is useful to know what he has done, another way of defining what problems he has solved. It is even more informative, however, to know what problems he is working on now. For these will define the growing edge of his being.
We sometimes think of the well-adjusted person as having very few problems while, in fact, just the opposite is true. When a person is ill or injured or crushed with grief or deeply frightened, the range of his concerns become sharply constructed; his problems diminish in scope and quality and complexity.
By contrast, the healthy in body and mind and spirit, is a person faced with many difficulties. He has a lot of problems, many of which he has deliberately chosen with the sure knowledge that in working towards their solution, he will become the person he would like to be.
Part of the art of choosing difficulties is to select those that are indeed just manageable. If the difficulties chosen are too easy, life is boring; if they're too hard, life is self-defeating. The trick is to move oneself in the direction of what he would like to become at a level of difficulty close to the edge of his competence. When one achieves this fine tuning of his life, he will know zest and joy and deep fulfillment.
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