I heard this speech when I attended my brother's grad last month. I found it really apt, given my emotional state (careerwise) at that time. I was also able to read Randy Pausch's book, "The Last Lecture" recently and I got lots of inspiring insights from it as well.
Ateneo de Manila University Loyola Schools
Commencement Address
March 28, 2008
Ateneo High School Gym
By Cecilia L. Lazaro
Rev. Daniel Huang, Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus, Mr. Manuel V. Pangilinan, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ateneo de Manila, Fr. Bienvenido Nebres University President, Dr. Maria Assunta Cuyegkeng, Vice-President Loyola Schools, Vice-Presidents, Deans, Administrators, members of the faculty, my dear graduating students, parents of our graduates who also today mark a milestone in their parenting career and deserve applause, friends.
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the Ateneo for a briefing regarding today’s commencement rites. As soon as I had passed by the guards at the gate, I kept asking myself—what in the world made me say yes to this generous invitation to come and speak to you today. While it is certainly an honor, and I thank you for it, it is also intimidating. So intimidating that, just the other day, my voice decided to show just how scared it was by not showing up in full force.
The invitation came at a time when I had been receiving many email messages about an internet video on Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. The video is entitled “The Last Lecture.” It is not a lecture given by a retiring Professor who had served his term of 50 or more years but by a rather young one who at 47 is at the height of his academic career (as a tenured Academic and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon.) The video was dubbed the last lecture because it was premised on the assumption that if you were going to die soon, what would you want to say?
Randy chose to talk about his childhood dreams – playing football in the NFL, becoming Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals, flying in zero gravity, and becoming a Disney Imagineer. He said that while he had had many dreams, not all of them had come true. The lesson he learned was that if you don’t achieve your dreams, you can still achieve a lot by trying. We can’t control the cards we are dealt, but we can determine how we play the hand.
Life is not about achieving your dreams; it is about how you live your life. He spoke of a life of integrity, of telling the truth all the time even if others opt to take the short cut or shave the truth. Once you start doing that, rationalizing the truth becomes second-nature. But if you hold on to your integrity by telling the truth all the time, living your life the right way, there is a tangible pay-off in the end.
How many of our childhood dreams come true?
And what is so special about childhood dreams?
They are the purest and most honest of our ambitions. They are devoid of considerations like fame, money and power. They are driven by what we love best and enjoy the most.
If you want to achieve your childhood dreams, have good parents who are there to have fun with you. Why? Because it is parents who allow their children the freedom to have fun, to become what they dream, and help them make their dreams a reality. Fun is good. Never underestimate the importance of having fun because if you do something that you enjoy, you will never work a day in your life.
But not everything we encounter in life is fun.
In Randy’s quest to become a football player, he met a coach who drove him hard –much like teachers who make life difficult for you. He felt that critics and coaches who drove you hard or kept criticizing your mistakes did so because they cared. Once they stopped, it was because they no longer cared or had given up on you.
Rejection, like brick walls are there for a reason. Brick walls are there for you to prove how badly you want something. They are there for people who don’t want it that badly. My mother used to tell me all the time when I would cry my eyes out about being rejected that rejection is good. That it is a character-builder. I used to wonder why rejection could ever be good---but with time and experience, I have learned the wisdom of her words. I have learned to never give up because oftentimes the best gold is at the bottom of the pile.
I am not a stranger to rejection. My dream was to work in media and it took all of 15 years after graduation for me to get to the point where I could even begin. There was neither golden spoon nor silver platter. All there was were sheer dogged determination and a never-quit attitude. When we set up Probe Productions, our small media company, 20 years ago, I was told it would not succeed because nobody watched TV programs that talked about issues. We were also trying out an unknown format - the investigative newsmagazine. Then, after 17 years of hard work, we were kicked out and left in the cold. What we learned was dogged persistence and the words, “never say die…” a term we still use today when the going gets tough.
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Most of what we learn, we learn indirectly.
Like the young Professor, another young boy not far from here had a dream of his own. Let me share with you the story of Victor from whom I learned a lot about life.
Victor was a twelve-year-old boy whom we met some 20 years ago while doing a story on street children. He had run away from home and was living under the bridge at the Quezon City Circle Rotonda. He had an impish look and the happy smile of a child with a wide open future ahead of him. In my rather long interview with him, he answered every question effortlessly…until I asked him if he loved his mother.
After a long silence, he said yes. I asked him why he had run away from home. Silently, his lips began to curl downwards as big tears welled in his eyes. I asked him “kung mahal mo ang nanay mo, bakit ka naglayas?” Again, a long silence. “Kasi hindi nya ako mahal.” “Bakit,” I asked, “Kasi po puta ‘sya.” His answers jarred me, but they were very real in the heart of this 12-year-old boy.
Although Victor was just one of many street children roaming the city, tapping windows of passing cars, he left a deep mark on all of us. Sadly, our eyes had seen what seemed to be the poster child of all young street children, who have been robbed of a future that is rightfully theirs.
Just a few months ago, we returned to Laguna where we had last seen Victor. We found him working, making hollow blocks, never having gone to school, dismissed by his mother as dead. Victor is now 32, has three children but no permanent address or income. He has aged but still has the same smile that we saw 20 years ago. But the glint in his eye was gone, replaced by the bitterness of lost opportunities.
Life had dealt him difficult cards. Like you and me, Victor too had a childhood dream—to become a policeman. But unlike you and me, he did not have a family to support him or allow him to have fun pursuing his dreams, much less send him to school. He wandered the streets at an early age, sniffing rugby to stave off the hunger pangs whenever there was no food to scavenge.
I was one of those in cars who would be irritated at the children who would tap at your car window. But after meeting Victor, I began to ask myself if I might share some blame in putting Victor on the streets by my indifference, by my being too comfortable in life.
I wonder now about his children and ask myself if Victor’s life might be repeated in the lives of his three little ones.
When we are young, we spend time thinking of how we can achieve our dreams. As we grow older, we turn our focus on how we can enable the dreams of others … much like what this great university teaches, to be a “man for others.”
After we recently aired our story, we received many calls offering to help Victor. Many of the viewers remembered him from the first time they saw him on TV. Today, Victor has a job as a utilityman for the MMDA and a little capital for a sari-sari store in the slum area where he lives. Ordinary citizens, viewers who were touched by his story, came forward to help.
Victor took up the challenge, worked and religiously paid the loan every week – 40 or 50 pesos, whatever amount he could set aside which symbolized other people’s trust and faith in him that he wanted to keep.All of us, including Victor, have a light shining within us. This is the idealism that burns brightly in our youth. There is a well-spring of goodness in every person that can be tapped. But that light is fragile, easily snuffed out if we forget to keep feeding the pilot light with passion and commitment. Make sure—like we do in an airplane, to first secure our oxygen masks of idealism before helping others don theirs.
We come from different backgrounds, and our lives move in different directions. We have different family names, but we share a common name. That name is Filipino.
I have great faith in the Filipino. In my media career spanning two decades, I have seen a variety of depressing and uplifting stories. But what stand tall in the clear light of day are the countless encouraging stories of human triumph and greatness of spirit.
As we gather here today, I know there are many who are thinking about what we can do for this country that we love. Like all responsible family members, we want to protect and make good on our common name.
If your dream is to make the Philippines a country we can all truly be proud of, then follow that dream for only you can make your dream a reality.
I end with a quotation from Robert F. Kennedy, and a challenge for you to do your share, no matter how small, to make change for good a dream fulfilled.
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the life of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy, build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
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