Read the full text of the Commencement Address given by Raymond Murray on May 26:
Welcome all of you to this beautiful day on this beautiful campus for Darlington’s 102nd Commencement exercise. I extend a special welcome to this Class of 2007 – the self-proclaimed “Best Class Under Heaven.” Before I begin, I’d like to thank the student for his or her words of encouragement written on my door last week. I appreciate the thought. Still, I guess I’d remind you that there is an “a” in Murray, and there is not one in “speech.” My last teaching moment with you.
Those of you who have had me as a teacher know that I have very few original thoughts. After teaching English for 30 years or so, one’s mind becomes full of what other writers and thinkers have produced. I found myself wandering over the writings of such disparate thinkers as Browning, Buddha, Disraeli, Shaw, Shakespeare, Emerson, and other classical thinkers.
Then I turned to more modern writers like Jagger, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” Or Stewart, “If there’s any words I can tell you to help you on the way down the road, I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley, or Keats, ‘cause it’s all been said before. Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off … and remember every picture tells a story.”
Then I started thinking about the talks you’ve heard this year and was reminded of the words of Andy Davis and Gen. Perry Smith, and I had all these thoughts in my head, and it was just too much. My mind became aglow with whirling transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. (Thought I’d throw a little Mel Brooks in there, too.”
Actually, that’s what I really want to talk to you about for a few minutes today – thinking. Purposeful, active thinking and how important it can be for you, how it can help you achieve whatever success you want to achieve.
There is a thriving industry built around our ability to think and our ability to control the way we think. In 1956, Earl Nightingale wrote a pamphlet titled, “The Strangest Secret in the World,” and that pamphlet started it all. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Maxwell Maltz wrote “Psych Cybernetics,” and Napoleon Hill put this power into another realm with “Think and Grow Rich.” How you think and how you visualize your purpose can alter your lives.
Many years ago, Albert Schweitzer (the great doctor and Nobel Prize winner) was being interviewed and was asked, “What is the matter with people today?” He was silent for a moment and then he said, “People don’t think!”
We live today with many problems in the world, but in many ways we live in a golden age. We have comforts aplenty – more than could be dreamed of only a few years ago. Science and medicine have advanced tremendously. In my lifetime, polio and pneumonia have been virtually eliminated. In our lifetime, you will see a cure for Cancer and AIDS. But now that this age is here, we almost take it for granted.
We live in a land of abundant opportunity, yet few people fulfill any opportunity. If you asked a group of 100 people if they want to be successful, they would all say, “Yes, of course.” They start out in life confident, self-assured, and ready to go. But by the time they are at the end of their working lives, most people – a great majority – are anxious to quit working, not for leisure time and a well deserved rest, but because they do not feel successful.
If I am going to talk about success, I need to let you know what I mean by it. Earl Nightingale defined success as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” If you are working toward a predetermined goal which is worthwhile, then you are being successful. You are not going to wake up one day and say, “Well, now I’m successful.” And that’s it. You have to continue realizing your ideal.
The person who says, “I am going to do this” and does it is successful. Remember the part about the worthy ideal, too. I’m not talking about “successful” robbers or drug dealers. Remember what Mr. Davis said about ideals and goals. He would let nothing get in the way of his attending the University of Georgia Law School. It’s important to keep your thoughts on the ideal and have a plan for attaining it.
Think of a ship leaving a harbor. There is a complete voyage all mapped out and planned – a captain, a crew, a navigator, all knowing what to do. The ship will get where it is going because they know where it is going. Now look at the ship with no caption, crew, or map – one with no goal and no destination. If it gets out of the harbor at all, it will end up on some deserted beach, a forgotten derelict. No plan, no direction, no guidance. It’s the same with a human being.
I’ll tell you who is being successful: the social worker who is helping others because that’s what he or she wants to do; the wife and mother or husband and father who is raising a family because she or he wanted to and is good at it; the cook who runs the corner restaurant and loves every patron served; the doctor who loves his work from the first day of medical school; the student progressing through the grades. Anyone who is progressively realizing a worthy ideal. And you know what? It’s relatively easy to do because you have a great deal of control over yourself. Instead of competing madly, all you have to do is create.
Now here is the key that Earl Nightingale discovered. We become what we think about. Many great, wise men throughout history have made this same observation even though they have disagreed about many other things.
Buddha: All we are is what we think about.
Marcus Aurelis: A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.
Disraeli: Everything will come to a person if he will only wait. I’ve brought myself by long meditation to the conclusion that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it – nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfillment.
Emerson: A man is what he thinks of all day long.
William James: The greatest discovery of my generation is that people can alter their lives by altering their attitudes and their states of mind.
George Bernard Shaw: People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get ahead in this world are those who if they don’t like the circumstances they find themselves in, they make new ones.
William Shakespeare: Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
We become what we think about. So if we have goals and plans – ideals – and we hold them in front of us, we are bound to be successful. So be bold in your thinking and seek opportunity. Envision your own greatness. Your reach should exceed your grasp. Certainly goals and plans and dreams can change, and that’s OK. But always keep a worthy ideal in front of you. Give yourself direction and a destination. What is it you want?
It is relatively easy to achieve success by Mr. Nightingale’s definition. Happiness might be another matter. Dave Gardner said, “Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.” I’m not sure it’s that simple. For one thing, no one is happy all of the time, so don’t expect to be. I hear parents say all the time, “I just want my kids to be happy.” And you’ve heard it all your lives, too. The danger arises at times when you are not happy, if you should start thinking something is the matter with you because you are not. It is normal to feel sadness and grief.
I understand that you know more about sadness and grief than people your age need to, and for that I hurt for you. I would remind you that the apostle Paul said, “We can live through suffering because suffering gives us endurance, endurance gives us character, and character gives us hope.” Yes, there is a time to weep in your sorrow, but there are more times in this life to rejoice in your hopefulness. And today is a time of great rejoicing and great happiness as you commence the next great part of your lives.
So, what about happiness? I think that by trying to be perfect on our own natures, we can free ourselves from the pain and injustice of our present existence. I’ll put that in “North Georgian” for you by quoting Dave Gardner again: “If the world is wrong, then right your own self.” If the world is cruel, then you have to become more kind. If you believe this world is unfair, then you have to be more just. If you hold that the world is false, then you have to be more honest.
Remember these words from the Sermon on the Mount; keep them constantly before you: “Ask and it will be given you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and it will be opened unto you.”
A great deal in this life is as marvelous and as simple as that. It’s so simple, in fact, that it is hard to believe that most of what you need is a purpose and faith. Above all, don’t worry. Worry brings fear and fear is crippling. Don’t worry about having to do everything yourself. Hold your goal before you and you will be surprised how much will take care of itself. Keep calm and cheerful. Don’t let small, petty things annoy you and get you off course.
I believe it will help if you find someone to share your goals, your dreams, and your course with – a boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, brother, sister, a favorite aunt, father, and mother – a faithful confidant. I believe it will also help you along your path to your dreams if you have faith in some higher power. I believe that we’re going somewhere. I do not believe that the architect of the universe built a staircase leading nowhere.
As you commence – and please remember that word means to begin – remember two important things I learned from Tom Kazee, the man in charge of student affairs at Furman who I met when he was at Sewanee. First, you are going to be very much more in charge of your life than you ever have been, and it’s your life. Don’t forget that. It’s not your parents’ life, or your grandparents’ life, or your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s. It is yours – literally. You must make critical decisions about how you live it. And you have to be responsible and mature about the impact of your decisions on the lives of those around you. It is especially important because YOU will be responsible and accountable for those decisions – no one else. YOU own your successes and your failures – no one else. There will be no one to check to see if you are awake, or get you to class, or to monitor your academic progress. You are going where there are no work details, no detentions, and no suspensions. There is jail, and that’s the reality.
Secondly, you are going to be OK. Don’t forget that your accomplishments so far are pretty impressive. You are graduating from an outstanding school, and you have had to have made good decisions to be doing so. You’ve made good decisions in the past, so trust your instincts to make good decisions in the future. Don’t expect to get every decisions right; no one does. We’ve all made a few bad decisions along the way. And remember it is perfectly acceptable to ask for help. Sure it’s your life, and trust yourself, but remember those who care for and love you will always have a supporting hand held out for you, and it is OK to hold it sometimes.
Take care of yourselves and take care of each other, and come back and see us sometime. God bless you and God speed.
