Commencement Speech
I applied to be the student speaker for Carnegie Mellon University’s Commencement 2016. This is the draft that I auditioned with.
-
I’ve never actually envisioned this day. I mean, I knew I would graduate at some point, but I always thought of graduation as an infinitely distant future, an inevitable milestone, but one that I never needed to concern myself with just yet.
A year ago, I stood right over there as I watched most of my friends with whom I had started CMU, graduate. And in that moment, as they celebrated their diplomas and threw up their caps, as they showed their families their studios and labs, and said goodbye to both the places they’d come to love and those they’d learnt to resent, it hit me.
I was given the opportunity to spend half a decade here, a period greater than a quarter of my life when I began, and it had rushed past me. I had come to CMU this over-excited, over-ambitious, 18-year old who thought he had figured life out. And something in the day-in-day-out routine of sleep deprivation and missed alarms, over-extending myself and competing for the title of busiest, had built these ever growing walls around me that had narrowed my vision to a singular, undefined objective. Almost like a horse with blinders on, I had been racing through those four years, not looking at what was around me, always focussed on an end I never really understood. And in doing so, I had lost track of the time I had, and the places I had wanted to go with it.
And so, the revelation of this finality was… liberating. These walls that I had built for myself, the perpetual busyness that I had scheduled: they had stripped me of my agency to do whatever I wanted to do. And the second I realised that, they vanished, and I was left standing in the middle of an empty field-of-potential that was waiting for me to build whatever I could imagine.
A year ago, the night before commencement, I sat on flagstaff hill for almost 2 hours and just watched the sun set. I had gone through what was honestly the most trying four months of my life that saw me question much of what I took for granted about myself, and I had been told that day that not only was I being failed for my studio, but I would not be allowed to undertake a year-long project to cap my time here, a project that I had convinced myself was my last chance to prove my worth.
And I just sat there, silent, plagued by this unrelenting self-doubt. And as I watched waves of colour roll over each other across the sky, and as the sun kept sinking no matter how much I wanted time to suspend it where it was, and as the evening breeze rushing down the hill sent shivers down my spine, something clicked.
That sublime expanse before me had always been there, that melancholic ritual of the sunset was unfailingly regular, and the first time I had chosen to experience it was then, four years in. Why? Because I felt like somehow what I was meant to do with my time here had to be something more profound. I had created these expectations and constraints for myself that were incompatible with this suspension in time. I was supposed to be moving forward, and this was about staying still. And yet, by taking that time to pause, the walls that had constrained me dissolved into the air, and I was, once again, left standing in the middle of an empty field, the sun had just set and it felt like the world was waiting for me to build whatever I could imagine.
It seems odd that the reminder of this finality, of the unrelenting passage of time can make us feel infinite. And yet if there is anything I have learnt from CMU and Pittsburgh, it is taking solace and finding freedom in that Absolute.
I landed in Pittsburgh on August 18th, 2011. It was my first time in this city, my first time in this country, my first time 10,000 miles from my family, and it was the most exhilarating feeling I had ever felt.
But, in that seemingly endless drive from the airport, the place I saw wasn’t what I expected it to be. The sky was overcast, it was drizzling (the next day we’d have a record storm that would flood half the campus), and frankly the city I saw through that cab’s window felt dreary, dead and depressing.
Despite the tenacious grip of the CMU bubble, Pittsburgh has, over the last few years, revealed itself to me. Where all I had seen in that first drive through was post-industrial decline; now I feel the remarkable, intangible energy of this city that allows us to see value in even the most mundane of things. I think Pittsburgh’s character is perfectly captured in its ability to make something as banal as driving out of a tunnel and on to a bridge truly awe-inspiring. That experience is an undeniable presence of reality, and so the city revealed its beauty, and indeed it can be a marvel, if you let it.
To me, that attitude is inseparable from the awareness of the finality that every chapter of our lives will have. We are always given a set of absolutes, and its our choice how we react to them, and how we imagine their futures.
And so, a year ago, as I was having that confluence of crises, I realised that my absolute was the one year I had left. The place I was, the people I knew and loved were still there, but the choices I made and the path I forged were free for my redefinition, as they had always been. And how I reacted to the situation I had been presented with was entirely in my control. I had rediscovered my agency, by reminding myself of its limits.
Through our lives, so many of us have been told to “Follow your dreams” and “Find your passion”. But I think that advice alone is limiting. We are all in a state of ever becoming, constantly changing, exploring, experimenting and discovering all these things about who we are and what we can do. And to think that a dream or a passion is a goal to aspire towards makes it a singular destination, to which we begin to build highways and tunnels that expedite and insulate our journey. That act of pausing lets those structures fall away, and leaves us to marvel at the sublime expanse of potential and possibility; of everywhere we can go from that point.
So as we sit here, at the end of our CMU journeys, take a moment to take it all in. We are a product of the places we have been, and the places we have become in. More than a milestone in each of our lives, this is a lookout. Climb to the top, and see the near limitless field of everywhere you can go from here, and feel infinite.
Congratulations Class of 2016!