Princess Lilue

*** LILLIES OF THE FIELD ****
Commencement speech made by Pulitzer Prize-Winning author, Anna
Quindlen.

"I am a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out
of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There
will be hundreds of people doing what you want to do for a living. BUt
you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

Your particular life, Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk,
or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the
life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank
account but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier
to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold
comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or
when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

HERE IS MY RESUME!

I'm a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my
profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer
consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try
to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make
marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to friends and
they are to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you
today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. I would be rotten, or at
best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true.

So here's what I wanted to tell you today:
Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the
bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much
about these things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a
lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself
on a breeze over Seaside heights, a life in which you stop and watch
how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water or the way a baby scowls
with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb
and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who
love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.

Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which
you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and
that you have no business taking it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.
Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work
in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.

All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing
well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It
is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the
melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It
is so easy to exist instead of living. I learned to live many years
ago. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the
only guarantee you get.

I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of
it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried
to do that, in part, by telling others what I learned. By telling them
this:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear.
Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And
think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live
it.