The last commencement I attended that spring was personal – Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June.
The challenge in leading a big life becomes trying to find ways to protect your dreams and your drive, to remain tough without being overly guarded, to stay nimble and open to growth, allowing others to see you for who you are. It’s about learning how to shelter your flame without hiding its light.
The goal, instead, is to find someone who will do the work with you, not for you, contributing on all fronts and in all ways.
How do we get more comfortable, less paralyzed, inside of uncertainty? What tools do we have to sustain ourselves? Where do we find extra pillars of support? How can we create safety and stability for others? And if we work as one, what might we manage to overcome together?
For now, though, I want to offer one small reminder, which is that real growth begins with how gladly you’re able to see yourself.
No one person, no one relationship, will fulfill your every need. Not every friend can offer you safety or support on every day. Not everyone can, or will, show up precisely when or how you need them to. And this is why it’s good to always continue making room at your table, to keep yourself open to gathering more friends. You will never not need them, and you will never stop learning from them.
What I want to say, then, is stay vigorous and faithful, humble and empathetic. Tell the truth, do your best by others, keep perspective, understand history and context. Stay prudent, stay tough, and stay outraged. But more than anything, don’t forget to do the work.
She tells me that it’s important to always presume the best about children – that it’s preferable to let them live up to your expectations and high regard rather than asking them to live down to your doubts and worries.
When you’re beginning something new, you can’t always see where you’re headed with it. You have to be okay with not knowing exactly how things will turn out.
How do we build places where gladness lives – for ourselves and for others, and most especially for children – and to which we will always want to return?
Which is another important thing to remember about friendship: You’re crazy if you think you get to make all the rules. What mattered was that we just kept showing up, in closeness, in commitment, in compromise, and even in fatigue. For me, it’s all about showing up.
And for me, there is no quicker or more efficient way to obliterate stress and get focused on the present moment than to throw myself into a hard-core, edge-pushing workout. Or even better, a series of them. I guess you might say that vigor is one of my Love Languages.
Being busy is a kind of tool this way. It’s like giving yourself a suit of armor to wear: If someone’s shooting arrows in your direction, you’re less likely to register any hits. There simply isn’t time.
I often say that it’s much harder to hate up close.
The notion of going high shouldn’t raise any questions about whether we are obligated to fight for more fairness, decency, and justice in this world; rather, it’s about how we fight, how we go about trying.
One of the greatest lessons life has taught me is that adaptability and preparedness are paradoxically linked. For me, preparedness is part of the armor I wear. I plan, rehearse, and do my homework ahead of anything that feels even remotely like a test. This helps me to operate with more calm under stressful circumstances, knowing I will most often, regardless of what happens, find some pathway through. Being organized and prepared helps keep the floor feeling more solid beneath my feet.
The thick-skin part means learning what to do with your rage and your hurt, where to put it, how to convert it into actual power.
Change happens one person at a time.
The unknown is where possibility glitters.
When you start to rewrite the story of not-mattering, you start to find a new center. You remove yourself from other people’s mirrors and begin speaking more fully from your own experience, your own knowing place. You become better able to attach to your pride and more readily step over all the despites. It doesn’t remove the obstacles, but I’ve found that it helps to shrink them. It helps you to count your victories, even the small ones, and know that you’re doing okay.
Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.