Dr. Candy's Baccalaureate Speech

Thank you, seniors, for the honour of speaking to you tonight. I know some of you had some worries about my skewering you, but I promise not to do so… much. Rather, I have one last piece of advice to give you, one I hope you find useful. This isn’t a lesson from studying history or the lessons of the past, but instead comes from the lessons of my own past. That advice is one simple word, one simple syllable, one simple demand.

Act.

Act. Such a little word, yet one with so much weight behind it - and so often in a bad way. Act up, act out, act crazy, act wild, act like Kovach – all the things we so often tell you not to do. And yet, here I am, telling you to do this very thing.

Act.

By acting I mean take action, make decisions, seize the moment. Mr. Asanga’s hobbies aside, I’m not recommending you become actors – California has enough nuts already. But act. Make choices, take responsibility, decide what course you will take and do it. All things have a season, but all seasons pass. You may make wrong turns, but making no turns at all makes you roadkill. You have a life ahead of you that will require action – jobs to do, work to turn in, people to meet, deadlines to make. But failing to act, to do the things you need to do, means that you will miss the things you want to do.

Act.

Sometimes acting is choosing not to do what is expected of you, what is demanded of you, what everyone else says you should do. Many of you have major pressure to ‘be something’ – be a doctor, be an engineer, be in college, be awake in my class, or be what your family or teachers or others wish you to be. But you may not be that thing. My childhood was spent preparing to be an engineer, with every class, with every activity shaped towards making me ready to be that. And when the time came, I discovered that that was not me. For me it was joyless; for me it was soulless. I could have chosen to stuck with it, and lose… me. Or, I could take a leap of faith and say, “No.” So I leapt, and found that as something else, I could take flight. Do not be afraid to say no. Otherwise you will spend your life living someone else’s, and be miserable for it. Do not be afraid to say ‘I do not know what I am, but this is not me.’ Life will not end when you close that door; it will allow you to open others – if you choose to act.

Act.

Do not be afraid to act in uncertainty, to take chances. Act judiciously, act with forethought – because your actions will have consequences. To act means to accept those consequences. One of the greatest of those consequences is that you will at times, despite everything you do, fail. You will fail in work, you will fail in love, you will fail in the eyes of others, and you will fail to avoid my sarcasm. And that is all right. Reward only comes from risk, not from cocooning yourself away from the world in the comfort of the familiar, the easy, the simple. Grow a thick skin, and keep it coming. One of my greatest teachers, Alan Piper, made me look like Mother Theresa. But he was never prouder than when we have back as good as we got – because nothing meant more to him than to see the fire in our belly, and the willingness to stand our ground and hold our own.

Be sensible, be prudent, but choose to act on the possibilities that come your way. Take that trip, talk to that person, take that random class. Those moments are the ones that will shape your life, and there is no way to know when they will happen, unless you act. Even the littlest decision can change your life for the better. Two small decisions changed mine. The first was asking if a professor could teach me Welsh. He said he could not – but he could send me where I could. I never did learn Welsh in the end, but it began my career in history in the UK. And the second? Choosing to help a group of uncomfortable new grad students feel welcome by breaking the ice at a greeting function for my department in Durham – and meeting my wife Melissa as a result. Two small choices and my world changed for the better.

Act.

When you act, do not just act in your own interests. Take with you from Massanutten the school’s motto, ‘Non Nobis Solum’ – ‘Not for ourselves alone’. Act not just for yourself, but act for others – because others may not act for themselves, or cannot act for themselves. Do not feel that you have to act to change the world – just change _your_ world. Even the smallest acts can change your life and that of others. We saw this in the 1992 riots, where an inner city preacher in the midst of anarchy and chaos chose to act with nothing more than a bible in his hand and a prayer on his lips to save a man about to be killed by a mob. You saw this in 1902, when Mt. Pelée on the island of Martinique erupted, roasting the northern end of the island in burning gases and ash. A larger woman, skin burnt to ash, awaiting her own death, chose to not wallow in her own pain and misery but sang. Sang her heart out, sang hymns that soothed the pain and misery of those suffering around her until help could come as well as her own passing – from which we get the phrase ‘not over until the fat lady sings’. And we see it every day in the work of unsung heroes such as Ibn Ali Miller, who confronted youths having a street fight in Atlantic City, NJ, and shamed them and the crowd filming the fight on their cell phones. This began a process that saw a whole neighbourhood made peaceful, made united, made whole. Remaking the world comes from the small efforts of everyday life as much from the giant steps of supposedly ‘great men’.

Act.

And let no one convince you that you cannot act – especially yourself. Too many times I have heard the excuses. “I’m a minor,”, or “My parents won’t let me”, or “I’m just too young.” Ridiculous. I know it is ridiculous because I thought the same thing, always waiting to do something, anything until after the next step, the next milestone, the next box checked, all the way into graduate school, where I was finally set straight. My first year of my PhD, I asked my supervisor, Michael Prestwich - the pre-eminent British medievalist of his generation – and a man who scared the daylights out of me - when graduate students were ready to start doing important work. And that man, whose opinion meant more to me than anyone else, looked at me as if I had gone mad. He said to me, “You already do everything I do; the degree just confirms what you became long before. It’s the old adage of Newton of dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants – and after all… we are all dwarves at one time or another.”

The diploma you will receive tomorrow only acknowledges for everyone to see the changes that you went through long before. You have gained no special insights in the past week that make you suddenly different, suddenly more adult – instead you are at the end of a process years in the making. Remember that, and remember that every part of life is a similar journey.

Act.

Act.

Act, because nothing will cast a greater shadow over your life than not acting. From bitter experience, I can tell you that the greatest shadows darkening your life will be the regrets from not acting – from not saying those words, from not taking that chance, from not doing what you could have done.

Martin Luther described purgatory not as my class, but as the waiting place between heaven and hell, as the place where souls who could not choose to accept God’s grace and forgiveness lingered from their inability to act and choose to accept God’s mercy in forgiving their sins. Do not turn your life into such a Purgatory. Act big, act small, act openly, act quietly. But act.