In high school I gave a welcome address at my commencement ceremony. The speech was OK, but not as original as I’d hoped. I quoted Kerouac, which was sort of disingenuous because I didn’t even make it through all of “On the Road” in American Lit.
Now I’m four years none the wiser, so I figure why not give it another shot.
If you’re still with me, let’s talk about air. The air that you and I breathe, and the other air, which we are told exists somewhere else, somewhere higher up where only a select few can reach it. Let’s talk about air and exceptionalism.
We have a problematic way of framing success as a mountain we must climb. The idea is that at the top you will know you have made it. The view will be spectacular, the air so thin that only an exceptional few can breathe it.
But we are not sherpas, and there is a good deal of baggage in our packs. We are not summiting Everest.
It is an absurd and dangerous vision, for if you are truly good, truly a person of growth and achievement, you will never be rewarded with something so definite as a mountain peak.
The mark of success is the crippling fear that there is always something more. It is the doubt that seizes your mind like kudzu: Did I do enough? How could I have been or how can I be better? What is next? To achieve, you first must be at least a little dissatisfied with what you have. Otherwise you would just stay put.
College can act as a Petri dish for this festering doubt. It is the first time we are old enough and on-our-own enough to realize that one of life’s most frightening qualities is its menacing typicalness. You do not need me to tell you that college is not a movie. Nothing is.
Yet at this time of year especially, we are told more than ever about the importance of seizing opportunity when it is in front of us. Of squeezing the nectar from life, as if it were some sweet pulpy orange.
This creates the boulder on the back, the pestering question: Am I “doing it right?”
Not every party is all-that great; most will involve a lot of standing and talking and searching for your drink, and on the walk home, there is a good chance you will see a couple fighting on the sidewalk. Our library looks more like a new-age German bunker than a red-brick sanctuary with dimmed wall sconces under which literary legends have passed for centuries.
Sometimes it seems like we are torn between two identities – the reckless yet intelligent undergraduates we are supposed to be and the devastatingly average, struggling-to-figure-it-out new adults we actually are. The former reads better books and never drinks warm beer. The latter might have fallen off the mountain.
At Northeastern, we are told to be global citizens, worldly and well traveled. If you can and want to, yes, please do that. Explore Cape Town and London, and you will be different for it. But the institutional message turns darker when it becomes exclusionary. You haven’t been to India? Not even the Dominican?
That is OK. You are not lesser.
There is no such thing as rarefied air. Mark Twain, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jonas Salk, Gandhi – they all breathed the same air as you and me. It smells like subway trains and hot dog carts, and if you’re lucky, a little salty and sweet from the harbor and the tulip buds. Get as much of it as you can.
None of this is an excuse for laziness. Complacency is debilitating; stress does not have to be. But we are constantly told we can and will be exceptional. That is a lot of pressure when exceptional is a mountaintop, and most of what we experience are everydays at sea level.
Maybe it would help to find a different vision of success, one that is more relatable and that recognizes the pace of daily life. Something that doesn’t involve constantly climbing with tunnel vision toward an unseen peak. Something that acknowledges the simple elegance of forward progress. Something that doesn’t require acting out any part other than your own.
If you never stop climbing, you might disregard the special stuff you pass all the time. Revel in the uncertainty of new adulthood because really bad pizza at 2 a.m. is bliss after six hours of cheap liquor. Some of the best nights consist of Nintendo 64, pajamas and friends on a God-knows-how-old denim couch because tonight you just can’t – can’t go out, can’t see strangers, can’t put on socks.
To lump these little triumphs in as lower parts of a mountain is to diminish them and miss life.
We like symbolic imagery though, so here’s an alternate vision to the mountain. It might be just as vague, but hopefully it is more accessible, and in that, encouraging.
You are on the side of a road or a worn dirt path, moving forward over terrain that is mostly gentle. Sometimes it rains and the dirt turns muddy, and the piercing winter chill leaves potholes in the pavement.
Along the way you see a number of interesting attractions – thick evergreen forests, long fields pregnant with autumn harvest, roadside taco stands, a giant ball of yarn. You stop, but then you continue walking, for you have no destination other than “further.”
Eventually, you reach a thin white beach where other people are watching a red sun rise on a burning horizon. You cuff your pants and walk barefoot across the shore, past the sea’s foaming edge to the spot where receding sand caresses your toes.
You have gone your own way as far as you can. That is exceptional.
The air here is briny and familiar, and the cool waves break gently around your legs.
-Zack Sampson is a senior journalism major and the former news editor of the Huntington News.
