Commencement Address to Northwest Academy Class of 2024

Family and friends, faculty and staff, members of the board of trustees, and above all, you, the graduates of Northwest Academy’s class of 2024, I’m honored by the invitation to speak to you today.

I remember the feelings of this moment from my own high school graduation—impatient to put aside childish things, apprehensive about what comes next.What I don’t remember is the adult who was in the role I am playing today. That speaker is one of a blur of grown-ups who were eager to talk at me about their own collegiate triumphs. I wasn’t listening very hard. I just wanted to get on with it.

I imagine you might feel the same way, so I’ve struggled with what I could offer to you that might be relevant, to say nothing of memorable. In the end, I turned to our son, a rising senior at another Portland school, to whom I’m deeply indebted for my remarks today. During his sophomore year, our son wrote an article for the school paper. The topic was desire paths on campus. Desire paths are footpaths we create through public spaces when the prescribed or architected paths don’t meet our needs.

A lot of desire paths are pragmatic, made by people who want to save time by walking from point A to point B. Nearly every switchback trail in Forest Park has a desire path that shortcuts straight from the bottom to the top. Others are capricious and wish-fulfilling. Sometimes people would rather walk in an S-curve than a straight line, or they create a path to a dead-end with privacy, or a path to a beautiful view. Where there are prescribed routes and where there are people, there will be desire paths. As a species, we are natural rule-breakers.

Nowhere are desire paths more common and more visible than on college campuses. An iconic quad of emerald lawn surrounded by stately buildings is nearly always transected by narrow, ragged lines of packed earth, the product of generations of students choosing their own way, breaking—in a small way—the rules.

As interesting as desire paths, are the ways that institutions respond to them. Some institutions are democratic, allowing desire paths to flourish. Other institutions have the authoritarian impulse, with fences with “no entry” signs. Authoritarian institutions never win…at least in this domain. An authoritarian can build a thirty foot wall in front of a desire path, and destroy that which makes a campus or park (or nation) worthy in the process, but that little footpath will eventually prevail.

Now, because this is a commencement address, you may have caught the scent of metaphor blowing in a few minutes ago. Am I actually going to say that your life is like a campus and it’s up to you to cut your path through it, regardless of institutional barriers? Not exactly. Your life before and after college, if you attend one, will not be like college. Your life will also not a be a path, or if it is, your life is likely to be a very curvy path with a lot of dead-ends and confusing intersections. You will sometimes have difficulty knowing what you desire. Your desires will change faster than you are able to keep up with. And even when you truly know what you want, that doesn’t mean that the rest of world will be willing to give it to you. It takes a lot of self-awareness and discipline to know what you yearn for, and it takes a lot of freedom, and resources, and good luck to be able to fulfill those yearnings.

Today, some of you know what you want to major in, or what kind of work you want to do. You may be right. You may also feel completely different ten years after graduation. Others of you have only the vaguest desire, or ten vaguest desires, of what you’d like to study or do. And some of you have absolutely no clue. Wherever you are, that’s okay. All of these are valid places to be. But it doesn’t always feel that way, because our society doesn’t validate them equally. We live in a nation and era shaped by capitalist systems and by ideologically divided institutions. These systems and institutions prefer that we stick to the paths they prescribe for us. They do not appreciate uncertainty. They do not profit from nuance.

So unless you are happy being what the systems you live within prefer that you be, it is vital to preserve a space within yourself for not knowing what path you desire, for exploration of your yearnings, or—as Buddhists would prefer it—to free yourself of desire entirely. I don’t have much hope of freeing myself of desire. I am too much a product of the greatest generation of consumers. There is always going to be a cashmere sweater that occupies way too much mental space for a few weeks during the fall. But as I age, I find I am better able to interrogate what I truly yearn for. I also think more, now, about the ethical dimensions of my yearnings.

When I walk on a desire path now, I think about the groundskeepers who spend a lot of time trying to erase that path according to the orders of their bosses. Is the two seconds I saved worth their hours of work? If I bypass a switchback in Forest Park, am I stripping roots and packing earth so trees can’t get water? What point of privilege have I proved by creating or contributing to a desire path?

I realize all of this seems like lot to put on a decision to cut across grass to get to class on time. That’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m saying, not every desire path is a good one. Think closely about what you yearn for. This thinking is complicated, the work of a lifetime. Our yearnings, and the choice of paths to reach them, are not just ours. Every yearning, every path, is a social, environmental and moral decision, can cause joy or suffering for ourselves, for the people we love, and for people we will never see or know.

You aren’t going to make the right choice every time. But as long as you examine and reexamine what you yearn for, as long you are both critical of and generous to yourself, you are on the right path.