A Graduation Speech
Image from Clipart Library
I was privilege to be selected by the graduating class of 2021 as their speaker for their graduation ceremony. I was selected in part because I too was closing out my time at the International Community School of Addis Ababa. I've been doing a lot reading this semester related to the field of positive psychology for a PE class I've been teaching called "Personal Well-Being". This reading, together with my own experience of life-transition, mixed all together with the reflections that come from a year of a global pandemic, contributed to the below speech.
I'd like to provide just a few notes before getting to the speech. First, if you're interested in this field of positive psychology and the literature around personal well-being, you should check out the free Coursera course called "The Science of Well-Being," by Yale Professor Dr. Laurie Santos. Dr. Santos started offering it as a psychology course at Yale and it quickly became the most popular course at the university (here's a NYT article about it from 2018). I built the online Coursera version of the course into my Personal Well-Being class and had students complete it has part of one of the units of the class. Secondly, I'd just like to point out that the theme selected by the graduation class of 2021 was "relentless." They felt the term appropriately described the nature of the pandemic that had caused so much upheaval in their final two years of high school. They also felt that it described a particular attribute that the class had developed as a result of that upheaval. Finally, the speech references the work of two people in the field of positive psychology: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Sonja Lyubomirsky. I've enjoyed their work in the following two books:
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life you Want by Sonja Lyubomirksy.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
A Graduation Speech: Reflections on the Disney Pixar Movie, Soul
For my colleagues here, I assigned the students to watch the Disney Pixar animated movie Soul, which was released late last year. If you haven’t seen it, let me first highly recommend it -- it’s great -- and let me provide you with a brief synopsis.
Joe Gardner -- voiced by Jamie Foxx -- is a middle-aged man living in Harlem, whose passion in life is Jazz. He’s been trying to wrestle up gigs with Jazz bands for years, but is still looking for that “big break.” To string together a living in the meantime he’s teaching middle school band at MS 70. Joe feels his life is stuck; it’s just on hold waiting for the chance of which he’s been dreaming. While doing his laundry in his mom’s tailor shop, Joe gets a call from a former student named Curley.
Curley explains that he’s been playing drums in the band for famous Jazz saxophonist, Dorthea Williams. Joe’s pretty awestruck and provides this foreshadowing line, “Wow, man. I would die a happy man if I could perform with Dorthea Williams.” It turns out the band has lost it’s pianist and Curley’s inviting Joe to come down and audition. He does and he gets the gig -- it’s the big break he’s been waiting for -- and then moments later, he falls down an open sewer manhole and dies. And that all happens before minute 9 of the movie...
Joe’s soul -- and thus the title for the movie -- ends up first in the Great Beyond and then in the Great Before, where he ends up becoming a mentor for a soul, named “22,” who’s never gotten her Earth pass to start living. Joe is tasked with trying to help 22 find her “spark,” which will earn her that Earth pass and send her to live a bodily existence on Earth; 22, though, is a soul that’s not actually interested in living. Meanwhile, Joe is a soul that was alive, but died before he started living. While 22 wants to avoid life, Joe wants to go back and actually live. In fact, at the moment right after his death, Joe exclaims, “This can’t happen. I’m not dying today. Not when my life just started.”
Without re-telling you the whole movie, I want to discuss two themes that I think could be useful for you graduates.
One of the themes that comes out in the film is this idea of “being in the zone.” Joe first experienced this feeling of transcendence -- this moment when time and space seem to fall away, this occasion of radical focus and presentness -- as a young boy when his dad first took him to a Jazz club. From that moment on, Joe felt that he was “born to play Jazz.” Jazz was his thing, it was his purpose. And only when doing his thing, did he experience this “being lost in the zone.”
This theme comes largely from the work of Hungarian-American positive-psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi grew up in central Europe during the 2nd World War and then the post-war Soviet-controlled era. He was struck by how different people responded to external circumstances and hardships. While some were destroyed by the war and the following political oppression, others, under the same or even crueler circumstances, still managed to flourish. In view of the external circumstances of our past year, I think Csikszentmihalyi is someone from whom we can learn something.
One of his major contributions to positive psychology is the concept of a “Flow State,” which he once described as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz." While one cannot live in a constant state of flow, there is a correlation between people who are regularly able to achieve this state and those who report happier and more fulfilled lives. This is the same concept Joe Gardner calls “being in the zone;” he feels moments of this when he’s playing the piano, but Joe is misled in a very important way about this idea of flow. Joe believes it’s achieved only through that one thing that he was born to do, and he’s still waiting for that big break in order to do it.
But Csikszentmihalyi’s work suggests that flow is not a state that happens to people; rather it’s a state that people pursue through choices. It’s also not achieved through one life-defining activity, but rather, as Csikszentmihalyi argues, is achieved by meeting three preconditions. First, one must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals. These do not have to be world changing goals; they just need to be goals that give meaning to the activity. If I cook just to fill my stomach, I probably won’t experience flow while doing it, but if I also cook to improve my skills at creating delicious meal experiences, then cooking can lead me to flow.
Secondly, the activity must provide clear and immediate feedback on my progress. Working towards a goal is pointless if I can never measure my progress. When I’m gardening I can see the sprouts break the surface, see the plants unfold, evaluate the health of those plants as I weed around them, and watch as the fruit develops and rippens. If I had to put seeds in the ground and wait a year before they sprouted, wait a year for any feedback on my work, I’d likely not enjoy gardening.
Finally, and most importantly, Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes the importance of a balance between the challenge of the task, and your skills to accomplish that task. If you have a high degree of skill, but the task is not challenging, you’ll quickly get bored and apathetic. If the challenge is high, but you lack the skills for it, the task causes worry and anxiety. But as your skill level and the challenge level become better calibrated, you’ll find yourself engaged and in control. When you hit that sweet spot of alignment between the challenge level and your skill level, where you’re pushed near the edge of your abilities, but still able to excel, that’s the moment of flow.
Perhaps you notice, in a way that Joe Gardner did not, how each of these pre-conditions for flow can be within your control. You can’t control everything that will happen to you in life. You can’t control all circumstances you will face, but you can definitely make choices that will lead to this flow state at least some of the time. In fact, other studies in positive psychology report that our happiness or unhappiness in life is determined in part -- about 50% -- from our genes (Lyubomirsky). A further 10% is determined by external life circumstances. But what’s powerful in this research, is that a full 40% of what determines our happiness relates to the actions, attitudes and decisions that we make. We are fully in control of this 40%, which is more than enough to make the difference. After this past year of difficult external circumstances, it’s helpful to remember that our happiness is still in large part within our own control.
The 2nd theme I want to discuss from the death and life of Joe Gardner relates to his quest, together with soul 22, to find her “spark.” From the beginning, Joe confuses this spark with the idea of life-purpose, and he believes that a) this purpose is something that you’re assigned from birth, but that b) you have to somehow find it, or it has to somehow find you. This misunderstanding is why Joe’s Earthly existence had been stuck in a sort of holding pattern. He was so focused on this thing that he thought was his only reason for life, so focused on waiting for his big break, that he wasn’t actually living. This is not to say that the concept of life-purpose or meaning is not important; rather, it’s to say that this is not something assigned to us at birth, nor is it something that we have to wait to have bestowed upon us. Put another way, it’s to say that life itself is enough reason for living. The “spark” that soul 22 was missing, the spark that Joe himself was missing, was simply the spark for life -- the desire just to live.
Joe begins to realize this when, after his first successful performance with Dorthea Williams, as he’s coming down from this moment that he wrongly thought would be the start of his life, Dorthea shares a little parable. She says:
“I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to an older fish and says, ‘I’m trying to find this thing they call ‘the ocean.’'
‘The ocean?’ The older fish says, ‘That’s what you’re in right now.’
‘This?’ says the young fish. ‘This is water. What I want is the ocean!’”
In a similar way, many of us are seeking life and when told that what we’re in right now is life, we mistakenly reply, “This? This is just high school… This is just college… This is just a job…”
In conclusion, if you haven’t yet watched Soul, you really need to. I’ve not done it justice. But to concisely sum up the lessons from Joe Gardner, here are my conclusions:
Despite the relentlessness of the things that happen to you -- like a global pandemic -- you have significant control over your quest of a fulfilling life. This includes the choices you can make to pursue moments of flow, a key element of happiness and of flourishing.
Remember that just living is purpose enough for life. Don’t wait for life to happen to you; just live it. In the closing line of the movie, Jerry asks Joe, “So what are you going to do? How are you going to spend your life?” I hope, as you get up from this graduation ceremony today you can reply as Joe did, “I don’t know, but I’m going to live every minute of it.” And I hope you’ll do that relentlessly.
