I think it's critical to be humble.
My high school's slogan was, and still is, "Men for Others." (It was
all-guys school run by the Jesuits, whom the novelist Pat Conroy once
called "the Rotweilers of Catholic education"). On a surface level this
justified the several hours of community service that was required to graduate. But as I went through college and into the working world,
I remembered my time there and dwelled on this mantra, deciding that,
at its core, it was urging us to conduct our lives' relationships with
selflessness.
Of course, plenty of graduates forget this and plunge head first
into the distractions of college life. Who doesn't? After I spent
a semester abroad, any last traces of my religiosity slipped away, and
I didn't do nearly as much volunteering as I should have after four
years in DC. I did take incredible service trips to South Dakota and New
Orleans on spring breaks in college, but otherwise I was consumed by
the bubble of academia and trying to enjoy what was left of my pre-real
world freedom, not to mention figuring out what I wanted to do in life.
And then a friend gave me a copy of The Best American Non-Required
Reading, 2006. The last piece of the collection is the
2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, delivered by the writer
David Foster Wallace. If you haven't read this,
do so immediately (you
can find it online). At its heart, it's a speech that articulates a
brilliantly original definition of humility. By way of two examples
Wallace fleshes out for the graduates the little routine hells they can
expect in the world beyond: being cut off by an aggressively speeding
Hummer in traffic and waiting in a miserably interminable supermarket
checkout line replete with screaming children and people talking too
loudly on their cell phones. But what, he asks, if the asshole driving
the Hummer had a sick child in the seat next to him and was rushing to
the emergency room? What if you thought about the fact that the people
in the checkout line are as bored and frustrated as you are, and that
some of them might have lives much more difficult and tedious than
yours? Allow me to quote liberally:
"…the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating
on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and
money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and
frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture
has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary
wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of
our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are
all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you
will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of
wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of
freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and
over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom."
Humility doesn't appear overnight--you become aware of
possessing it only after a slow-churning accumulation of the right
kinds of experiences, but particularly the constant remembrance that
humility is inextricably bound to the idea that, without others, we have nothing.
And the consequent payoff is the natural emergence of other traits from
it: patience, sensitivity, balance, forgiveness, and my favorite of
all: the crucial ability to not take yourself so seriously.
I think it's critical to be humble. 