I need a commencement speech

(This was a column that originally ran this time last year when my son graduated high school.)

   The kids filling the seats of the Warner Theatre donning mortarboards and flowing gowns were the stars of the show. The pomp and circumstance was for them. The floral arrangements and diplomas were for them. And the keynote speeches were for them. As we all gathered and beamed with pride, wishing them high ideals and all the good life has to offer, we knew inherently, they are the future. It only made sense that on this milestone of graduation, they should be the recipients of all the wisdom-filled speeches laid out before them. 

   But after sitting through my son’s high school graduation, I have come to the conclusion that commencement addresses are largely wasted on the young. While these bright kids have their entire futures lying at their feet, how can they possibly grasp that? I suspect, like my son, many of them are looking about as far down the road as September when many of them will start college. The idea that their lives are being shaped by the decisions they are now making is just too immense to wrap their minds around. Most of them live solely in the moment, which is how it should be.

   I have yet to meet a teenager who doesn’t think he or she will live forever. I have yet to meet a teenager who doesn’t know everything. That, along with invincibility and shortsightedness, comes hand in glove with being young. As I listened to the keynote speakers that night, I couldn’t help but wonder if their words impacted those young, naive minds as much as they did mine.

    It dawned on me during his graduation that it’s not my son who needs a graduation speech; it’s me and my generation. Let’s face it. For some of us, the Golden Rule has lost its luster. We are the ones sitting in the audience who need to be reminded that life is a marathon, not a sprint. We are the ones who often lose site of the eventual successes guaranteed by hard work, turning the other cheek and taking the high road. We are the ones who doubt whether it will all work out in the end. For unlike our children, we are old enough to know we aren’t going to live forever. We realize all too well we are vulnerable. We are obsessed with the long term and refer often to this vague thing called the future. We have to struggle to stay in the present.

    Yes, we are the ones who need commencement speeches. They drape the tapestry of the bigger picture in front of us that sometimes gets lost by our own tunnel vision. They give perspective like our parents did, reminding us in adages and handy, bit-sized bits of wisdom that nothing is a bad as it seems.

   While the young are the ones who will eventually inherit the earth, the truth is we oldsters own it now. And as its stewards, we’re expected to troubleshoot its myriad problems. Given that hefty responsibility, where is our pep talk?  Check out my Erie Times-News blog.

Who moved my comfort zone?

Life does that to us, doesn't it? Just when we get settled into our comfort zone and have defined and accustomed ourselves to its boundaries--BANG! Something happens and the ground shifts. Our comfort zone is gone. We find ourselves rummaging around, trying to find it once again. Sometimes, the shift is a minor tremor and we regain our footing and rebuild it with some effort. But more often than not, the shift is colossal, like an internal earthquake, and no matter how furtively we look, nothing is familiar in the aftermath.
   As we pick through the debris, desperate to reconstruct the familiar, we are left with some emotional options especially when it dawns us that the familiar is gone forever. We can give up, accept defeat and just sit down in the demolished pile of the used-to-be, feel sorry for ourselves and bemoan the tragedy of losing what we have become accustomed to, and then slowly wither and die. Or we can be completely self consumed and develop the belief that this only happens to us and very few can understand what we are going through, thus underscoring our general belief that life is a them vs. us scenario and, dammit, we are not going to let them win. Of course, the result of that is usually stress-induced health problems, an overall bitter attitude and a constant belief that life is hard and it sucks.
   Or we can accept that maybe the whole point behind life is to have our comfort zones challenged and demolished on a fairly routine basis, and it's what we do to redefine, recreate, rebuild and thus morph into more flexible, pliant versions of ourselves that matters.
   And you know what? The end result is that by doing the latter, we find that given enough time and enough experiences, our comfort zone expands and breathes and, sooner or later, it encompasses everyone, everything and every variation of life around us. The whole world, no, the universe, becomes our comfort zone.