Anna Quindlen - American University Graduation Ceremony Speech

This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.

~ I’m 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 out there with your same degree: there will be thousands 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 accounts but also your soul.

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

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work 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 my friends and they to me.
Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.
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 pay check, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those 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 at the seaside, 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 sweet 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 realise 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 beer 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, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour 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 to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. 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 had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the back yard 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 with joy and passion as it ought to be lived. ~

No Country for Old Men

Sunday Herald Sun Magazine- 8th Feb 09

There are few bigger pleasures for a single man than sharing a house with his mates. Beer cans are crushed on foreheads, drunk women are brought home by even drunker men, and no food is eaten that hasn't arrived on the back of a moped or isn't served from a plastic container.

Oh, what joy it is to be alive and living with other blokes in those deady days of your 20s. It isn't bad in your 20s either. But once you're over 35, well, it starts to look suspicious. One writer referred to it recently as the land of the "male spinster". And, increasingly, women are seeing men who never settle down, as not so much 'intriguing' as 'worrying'.

According to US sociologist Michael Kimmel, this is 'Guyland'. In his book of the same name, he calls it "the perilous world where boys become men." It's where "young men in their late teens and 20s have nothing better to do than hang out and brag about how much they drank the previous night, or the random girls they've hooked up with."

Sure, it's a lot of fun, but you have to check out of Guyland at some point. That's what I did recently, albeit somewhat late in life. At one-minute-to-midnight at the end of my 30s, I swapped hooking up for tidying up, and bragging about drinking for someone nagging me about drinking.

Yet, some men never leave. These days, 'confirmed bachelor' isn't a euphemism for homosexual, but a description of a slightly sad bloke who won't give up the game. They don't think Guyland is a state you pass through in your 20s, but somewhere you aspire to live forever. Women, perhaps rightly, are starting to clock that an unmarried man over 40 isn't a playboy, but more likely a loner with serious commitment issues and a huge collection of porn.

One acquaintance, a film sound technician and bachelor of 45, attests, "I never want to settle down. Why should I? I grow older every year, but the chicks stay the same age. I can still pull women in their 20s. And besides, the thrill is in the chase."

It's a tempting lifestyle. In fact, life in Guyland is great until the day you wake up and it just isn't great any more. For most men, that happens when their married mates reach a critical mass. Being a single guy is a riot even in your late 30s, when smug marrieds outnumber footloose shaggers- as long as there are enough of you to form a round at the pub to pour scorn on your contemporaries and their trivial conversations about overpriced strollers and out-of-town property bargains.

For me, the revelation I'd overstayed my visa in Guyland came the day my flatmate upped and married, the selfish bastart. There I was, living by myself, looking down the barrell of 40 and thinking, am I going to die alone? How come even takeaways come in sizes designed for two people?

So you meet someone- in my case, clearly, the love of my life- and suddenly, well, I'd like to say I've made a compromise, a trade-off between freedom and domesticity, but I have to admit to all my single brethren: it isn't. It's more like swapping a lifestyle that's built for mental ill-health for a life of staggering happiness and the odd argument about whose turn it is to pay the cleaner.

As comedian Chris Rock said on a recent stand-up tour, "The choice for men over 35 is simple: live on your own- want to kill yourself; get married- want to kill your wife." And, sadly (and not at all funnily), the statistics for single male suicides back him up.

A whole raft of research shows that some of society's longest life expectancies are found among nuns, whilst the shortest are found among single men. Single men die early; they drink more, smoke more and kill themselves more often, whereas single unmarried women live longer than their married sisters. The maths is simple: marriage is bad for women and good for guys.

So what are you gonna do? Not marry simply to save some chick's life? I don't think so. Marry her and save yourself. It's every man for himself, and the selfish man has only one choice: if he wants to die happy and old, marry and marry quick. Staying too long in Guyland is for those with a death wish.

Of course, this doesn't mean the transition from late-30s singleton to smug married is without is 'decompression sickness'- or what one bachelor buddy who got hitched recently calls 'the wedding bends'. You have to learn how to listen not only to a woman's problems, but also loud phone calls to her friends. (She has to learn how to listen to a loud television playing World's Most Amazing Sporting Disasters and Car Crash Nightmares). And you have to learn to compromise- something men living in Guyland never do, because they always wnat to do the same thing (get drunk, get laid, watch World's Most Amazing Sporting Disasters).

But, in return, you'll have your feet rubbed when you're stressed, and you'll have sex on tap. No matter how much they brag, that's something blokes in Guyland will never have.