LILIES OF THE FIELD

Commencement speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Anna Quindlen at Villanova University

I am a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work.

You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no-one else has. There will be hundreds out there with your same degree; thousands doing what you want to do for a living, but you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at a computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account but your soul.
People don’t talk about the soul very much any more. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter’s night or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve received the test results and they’re not so good.
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say.
I am a good friend to my friends and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and meet them for lunch. I would be rotten or at least mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your job if your work is all you are.


So here is what I wanted to tell you today:
Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so much about those things if you blew an aneurism one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over water, or how a baby scowls with concentration whilst trying to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter.
Get a life in which you are generous. Realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on three beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.
All of you want to do well, but if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. So easy to take for granted the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears then rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned this is not a dress rehearsal, and today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:
Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with a joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

Anna Quindlen