Socrates said-in a mantra that could easily be Brown's unofficial motto-that the unexamined life was not worth living.
In other words: There are times in our lives when we need to ask ourselves, just what in the world am I doing? Sometimes the answer is clear: we take organic chemistry because we want to be doctors. We blow off our reading and spend all day on the Main Green because it's just so sunny out! But sometimes answers come less easily.
I had one of those more difficult moments last spring, in a train station in Venice. A solo traveler for the first time in my life, I had three days all to myself. I had decided I wanted to go somewhere far from the madding crowd. I wanted Adventure with a capital A. And so I found myself with a ticket to Bolzano, a city of 100,000 people in the foothills of the Italian Alps.
My reasons for making this trip had once seemed sensible, but now they seemed anything but. Because I didn't know anything about Bolzano-and I don't speak Italian. I worried I'd end up lost in the middle of an Italian hamlet, gesticulating wildly to friendly villagers who would only smile and nod in response to my frantic pleas for help. What in the world am I doing? I asked myself, half-contemplating tearing up my ticket and turning back. But there I was, a pack on my back and a knot in my stomach, walking towards the platform as they called my train because I had nowhere else to go. ...
What in the world am I doing? many of us might be asking today. Our parents, fearful we'll reclaim the childhood bedrooms they've converted into libraries or guest rooms, might be asking the same thing. What in the world are you doing? We came to Brown in search of truth and wisdom but find ourselves departing as clueless as we were on the day we arrived. We've learned to ask the big questions. But the big answers remain frighteningly elusive.
And all the celebration of this weekend is a wonderful distraction from a terrible truth. We are about to leave College Hill and enter a new, scary world-with no idea what in the world we're doing. You-our teachers, our family, our friends-you shower us with good cheer. But what you're really doing is cutting us loose, pushing us out of the nest. Congratulations, you tell us-now go ahead. Fly away.
But after four years here we're still not sure if we're ready to fly. I don't think you ever taught us how. Instead, you taught us aerodynamic equations, comparative vertebrate anatomy, the theory of gravity. So we know that we aren't very aerodynamic. We don't have wings. And when we leave the nest gravity will pull us faster and faster towards the ground.
Somehow that knowledge doesn't comfort us.
And maybe we should have spent less time reading Plato and more time with another canonical text: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Because Adams puts it quite plainly: if you want to fly, all you have to do is throw yourself at the ground...and miss. Yes, he admits, you're going to get that second part wrong at first. Most of the time, you'll throw yourself at the ground ... and crash. And you pick yourself up, make sure nothing's broken, and do it all again.
As we jump, Adams explains, we have to get distracted, forget the ground exists. If we're preoccupied with thoughts of falling, we doom ourselves to crash. But if we stop thinking about the impossibility of what we are about to do ... that's when we suddenly find ourselves floating in mid-air.
The problem is that being the good Brown students that we are, we don't like to stop thinking. Instead when we're scared, we overthink. We examine. We ask questions. We deconstruct. After all, this is what we've learned to do best over the past four years. We don't read novels; we analyze them, picking apart their symbols and their themes and the psychological motivations of their characters. We travel to beautiful places, not to admire their beauty, but to chart their sedimentary cross-bedding.
This sort of intellectual activity can open countless doors for us, and it has. We've discovered new ideas, made the world better in infinite ways. But it also risks locking us in to one particular way of life, one that's detached and hyper-aware, overly deliberate and pragmatic. In examining every facet of our own humanity, we forget that sometimes we can be superhuman.
And flight, of course, is the most superhuman feat of all. So to fly, we have to draw not on our long hours in the Rock but rather on those moments of daring and temporary insanity, when we asked ourselves what in the world am I doing ... and had no good answer. We've all had them. We've taken the class outside our concentration we never thought we'd be able to pass. We've auditioned for plays, hoping we'd learned enough about acting from watching Mad Men to try it ourselves. We've spoken in front of hundreds of people, praying we wouldn't lose our voice.
And in these moments, we did exactly what Adams tells us to: at some point, we stopped asking ourselves what in the world we were doing and started just doing it. And we forgot that we were supposed to crash and burn. Instead, we passed that class. We got a part in that play. And-knock on wood-we made it through that speech. I forced myself onto the train back in Bolzano. And of course, I did not get lost. I did not die. I spent three glorious days in the mountains, eating gelato in sun-soaked parks and hiking along beautiful alpine trails-and flying.
These times when we've plunged headfirst into the unknown and the unpredictable have been some of our moments of greatest triumph, and greatest adventure, and greatest joy. And they were the times when, in fits and starts, we were flying. And we weren't even aware of it. We've been puddle-hopping without realizing our feet were leaving the ground.
And I wonder if maybe you-our families, our professors, our friends-you knew more than you let on. You saw us take to the air and didn't even say a word. Because if we had known the impossibility of what we were doing, we might have been too scared to even risk jumping. So instead you stood there and kept teaching us that gravity was an immutable law of nature, all the while setting us to longer and longer flights.
Until today. We stand together peering over a cliff taller than any we've ever known. It's scary. The uncertainty of our futures defies all our attempts to systematize, to plan, to do what we our instincts tell us to. More than a handful of us, I'm sure, want nothing more than to run back to Keeney and do it all again. Anything to keep ourselves on solid ground for just a moment longer.
But we can't. Our time here is over. The ground is eroding beneath our feet. The world beyond College Hill beckons. We have to jump.
Yes, we might fall, and crash to the ground in a glorious bellyflop. But we might also fly higher and farther than we even think is possible. And there's only one way to find out.
Take wing, my fellow Brunonians. And congratulations, Class of 2012!
