And I said, "It’s called pre-emptive parenting. It’s perfectly logical."
The reason I share this story is because the single most inspirational sentence ever uttered in my presence wasn't even meant to motivate me, but sometimes we grab onto precious things that do not belong to us, that's usually a felony, anyway, and we run away with them, and right or wrong, they make us richer. Once, a guy was talking and he said, "If you don't ruffle a few feathers, you're probably not doing your job." Please don't ask me what I was doing at a cockfight, but the point was well taken.
The greatest fear we face these days is phobiphobia. The fear of fear itself. It is the fear of asking questions. I am lecturing all of you to reduce our dependence upon our dependence on comfort zones.
But in addition to my lecture, allow me also to offer a bit of praise. Those of you who show up on Monday and ask, "Can I succeed?" already have. The power of fear, one that a lot of us old VISTAs faced, lies in the ability of fear to buy our silence, to quell that curiosity within us that demanded we ask, why the hell do we still have so many of these same problems?
To ask the question is to succeed. To name your fear is to conquer it. Later on, you will make a pledge, repeating, 'I will get things done.' But on Monday, before you set off for work, ask yourselves, 'Can I get things done?' Our hope lies not in the courage of your convictions but in the courage of your curiosity.
I wonder if you will accomplish all that you set out to do this year. And every year since I graduated from AmeriCorps 10 years ago I have wondered if I will do the same. But this decade's worth of questioning shouldn't frighten you.
I am not afraid to question why we still face these problems. Moreover, I am not afraid to question my ability to do something about it. I know that the hardest task ahead of me day in and day out is simply asking myself, why on earth should I leave my comfortable desk chair for a few hours each week? I am not afraid to ask that question. And I am not afraid to wonder if I will make any difference whatsoever. I am no longer afraid to question my own abilities. I am no longer afraid to be the one kid in class who asks the dumb question that all those teachers of ours assured us never existed.
I'm not afraid to ruffle a few feathers. And this annoyance, and believe me, there is no shortage of people who will assure you that I have annoyed the hell out of them, is not steeped in antagonism or belligerence. Curiosity does not require cruelty. There are surpluses of cruelty reserves in this world of unknown capacity. And I will tell you this, you cannot spend your way out of a cruelty surplus. You have to starve it, like a fever, despite what my grandmother always said, which was to drown it in teaspoons of bourbon and honey, perhaps the one lie she told me that I find mildly forgivable.
Look at yourselves as independent carbon emissions traders then. Overall, we burn through a lot more kindness than we can generally produce. As a result, kindness has become very valuable these days. And yet, we are less willing than ever to pay for it. The 1,000 of you in this hall are covering our excesses. Without you, the rest of us would have to be a whole hell of a lot nicer, more forgiving, more involved, more aware.
Don't you dare forgive us that debt.
Chapter three of my speech is again about urban mythology. (By the way, I have to again apologize for how long I have carried on today. In four years, I have never spoken to such an extent and it has always been an overwhelming honor to be asked to do so, and if I am ever asked to return I promise to tell you that I will be more concise. I won't be. But I promise to tell you I will be. That is the true nature of hindsight after all. Not that you would do things differently if only you had known. But that you would SAY you would do things differently, even though you really wouldn't. I am totally serious on this point and you know it.)
Return with me back in hindsight, then a few years. I am in a classroom. The man at the podium delivers one of the oldest lessons from our earliest childhood and as the audience applauds I realize why it is I feel I never belong. A friend looks at me, notices my hands firmly unmoved from my lap and asks, "Something you don't agree with?" At the table, eyes roll in abundance. I am that ever annoying participant who never agrees, am stunned when others do. I want to say to them, "No, that's just not true. What he said is mythology. It's not even good mythology."
They will continue to applaud and I will be thinking about my son coming home from school, likely from a similar lesson, and he will ask, "Do you know that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but that if you put a frog in cold water and slowly heat it up to boiling that it will stay there and die?"
This is our slippery slope.
"No," I say, "I do not know this. I think you have it backwards."
"But," he'll ask, " if you drop a frog in boiling water, do you not think it will jump out?"
"No. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it will die. It will stretch out its arms and legs in a final act of suffering and surprise, and it will remain there until you remove it like a lobster."
"But if you put it in cold water and gradually heat it..."
"No. NO. Imagine that you are taken from your comfort zone, your home, you are locked up into a room with no exit. There are people, as well as animals, who have not lifted a hand in defense when that final moment came even as it was spotted miles away. Listen to me. Ignore the old rules of the great experiment. Put the frog in a pot next to a pond, next to his home. Give him a reason to jump and a place to go. Whether you heat the water or not, he will not stay. We've done this, you know. What poor creature has ever remained willingly in our possession except those we killed or those we tamed or those without any hope whatsoever?"
"Your teacher may not have known this, but this story is not about frogs. It is about people."
This is what you are all going to realize in the next year and it is what is going to make you the 1,000 most annoying individuals in the entire pacific northwest. You are not the pot, you are not the kettle, you are not the water too hot, or the water too cold, you are the untenured professor who will ask, why don't we just take this experiment outside? And as the establishment rolls its eyes and showers you with ruffled feathers you will cast aside the old mythology and turn the heat down just a bit and maybe tilt the container towards home and carry the picnic basket down towards the water's edge and forget about the potato salad for a moment as you find yourselves at home in this new comfort zone where people are no longer experiments but actual people trying to overcome decades of urban mythology and when they flash their smiles at you you will flash right back and when they offer you bundles of joy you will accept and be joyous and when the people stand in rote applause you will raise your hand and not be afraid to ask your questions, regardless, wear the courage of your curiosity like a solemn commitment, and let loose with the occasional profanity when the appropriate euphemism escapes your vocabulary, let loose with the occasional compliment when the appropriate complaint escapes your mood, and go into your very last day as though it's your very first, overwhelmed with the stories you will just absolutely have to tell all because you once wondered if you had something to share.
And my great honor, my thrill, is to stand up here and realize that I've been at this long enough to know that you do.
Do not forgive us this debt.
Thank you all. Have a great year.
1 comment:
As always, your ability to simultaneously inspire, affirm, and entertain is nothing but flat-out astonishing to me. These speeches of yours leave me speechless every time you post one, and wishing to turn back time and be one of those to whom your speech is addressed.
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