Love Being Made Visible
A letter to the class of 2025
Thank you for being here. As always, these essays are free and publicly available without a paywall. If my writing is valuable to you, please share it with a friend or support me with a paid subscription.
Part of the motivation for what I write here has always been about having a place to share things with my students that I don’t often get the opportunity to in other contexts. So, in the middle of commencement season (even though no one asked), here are some things I’d like to share with this year’s graduating seniors.
To my students: I am proud of you, and I will miss you.
Dear friends,
Graduation day is bittersweet. The sweetness is the celebration of who you have become and all you have done these past several years. Countless hours spent on problem sets, projects, papers, presentations, and posters. Long hours dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of understanding, the development of skill, and the formation of character. All of this is worth celebrating and remembering.
But the sweetness is mingled with sadness. Unlike the summers before this one, this May's departure is of indefinite length. This summer you go out from this place in a new way. You are sent out without a return ticket.
Hear me: I am excited and proud to send you out. Thrilled even. After all, this is the goal. We knew all along that your time here was limited. To keep you "in here" indefinitely would be to rob you (and the world). We are so proud of the work that you have done and can’t wait to see all you will do.
And yet, there is always more to say. And so, I thought that I would write you this letter—an attempt to send you out with a few parting words of advice and guidance.
The direction you're heading is more important than knowing the steps along the way
It’s normal to wish that life came with turn-by-turn directions. Even better if it came with a GPS that could help us take the right detours to avoid the traffic and road closures. Despite our wishes, no such thing exists. Absent a detailed plan, the best you can do is to set off in the right direction.
As you embark on the next season of your life, you have an opportunity to reflect on the direction that you're heading and the vision of the good life that it implies. What drives you? What is your mission and vision? What are your values? Are you on a good quest?
Always be prototyping
Although there is no grand unifying plan, this doesn't mean you are flying blind. As the goals you are pursuing evolve, don't be afraid to try things out to explore ways to more closely align what you are doing with where you want to go. You don't need to take big leaps of faith into the dark unknown in hopes that you'll land where you want to be. More often than not, with a little bit of creativity, there's a way to prototype your way there. Continue to foster your curiosity. Keep exploring.
Your resources are not an endowment
Once you've experimented with prototypes and learned about potential opportunities for good quests, don't be afraid to go for it. Too many people idolize a life where they treat their resources like an endowment. Their goal is to get to a place where they never have to re-risk the principal and can simply live off the interest. This is no way to live. Living this way takes the good quests off the table. Good quests not only require risk, they require re-risking.
Pursue coherence, not balance
Lots of people will tell you about work-life balance. Hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing. It's a bad framing.
I’d like to submit a framing I think is much better: work-life coherence. This breaks down the zero-sum, false-binary approach to work and life. The truth is that you can design your work and life to work together in harmony. Balance implies tradeoffs. There certainly are some. But more often than not, there are third ways. Viewing work and life as always in direct competition with one another isn't helpful or accurate.
Think in months, not days; decades, not years
We humans are pretty good linear thinkers. The problem is that most models are only linear when you look very closely, and often much more complicated when you widen your time scale of interest. Often, there is a natural compounding and momentum that builds so that growth consistently picks up over time, even if it starts very slowly. It's cliche, but true, that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term and underestimate what we can do with consistent effort over the long term.
What would it look like to design for the long term? How might you approach your work differently if you were in it for a decade instead of just a year?
Becoming
As you go out, never forget that you are always becoming. The end of your time in college is indeed a waypoint worth commemorating. It is a checkpoint along your journey that signifies a significant completion. You ought to rejoice in the satisfaction of what you have completed.
And yet, you have not arrived. You are always becoming. The only equilibrium is allostatic.
We tend to imagine that there is some point at which we will have "made it," where the struggles that we have endured will grant us a reprieve and the opportunity to cruise for a bit. Fortunately, this is not reality.
The satisfaction we imagine will come upon arrival and completion is not what we imagine it to be. Finishing a race, completing a degree, and reaching the moment you have visualized for many years is satisfying. And yet, what you will soon realize is that the satisfaction of achievement does not last.
The true satisfaction in life is found not in completion and achievement, but in contentment. And the character of contentment is about the process, not about the product. It's about a love of the work to be done, a joy in the day in and day out. One of my favorite poets Khalil Gibran puts it beautifully.
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when the dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.Gibran gives a hint of that inmost secret later in the poem when he writes "work is love made visible."
The only modification I would make to Gibran's phrasing is to change the tense of the verb. Your work is your love being made visible.
Your work is a demonstration of your love: love for your discipline, your neighbor, and your world.
As you go out, let that framing guide you. Consider your life through the frame of the present progressive. Let your work make your love visible.
Yours Always,
Prof. Brake
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Got a thought? Leave a comment below.
Reading Recommendations
lets loose with his take on a lot of what’s happening in higher ed with AI. The tl;dr? Cut it out.Cutting corners with AI is just an elaborate way of cutting your own throat. If a lot of professors do it, just as professionals in other fields, they’re just collaborating in making it easier to get rid of expertise and knowledge work altogether. I understand why it’s tempting to give into nihilistic despair at this moment, but at least try to hold the line.
Thoughts on AI worth considering from
.The Book Nook
I enjoyed The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton when we read it in our book club a few years ago, and decided to pick up one of his other novels, The Devil and the Dark Water, to kick off the summer.
The Professor Is In
Some photos from a small subset of seniors who graduated on Sunday.
Leisure Line
No photos of the finished products, but good to toss some pies this weekend.
Still Life
The tomatoes are beginning to appear in the backyard garden.
It is so obvious that "your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness". Thank you for this post, and for being so open in sharing where your thought and practice takes you.
You have a quiet and appreciative audience out here, too, among us who who teach and learn. Thank you for persisting. And my tomatoes are coming on, too.