The world is not your oyster — yet

It is graduation season and lots of advice and exhortation is getting handed out, or down, to the many young people about to enter the world. Much of it will include hoary chestnuts like being true to oneself, not losing your values, persistence and following the lives of exemplary people.

We are supposed to get back up when life knocks us down, eschew the pitfalls of money and power and give back. We are to look to those who raised us and say thank you. We are to gaze at the far horizon and dream the very best and biggest dream we can.

Except, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. Few reach the dreams they hold inside them, many get lost down the first or second path they find and mediocrity and compromise are all too easily accomplished.

People die on us, betray us, or, worse, we betray ourselves. The world, rest assured, doesn’t give a damn about us. It is, in fact, waiting to bludgeon us into submission. Dreams can come back to haunt us, corrosive and demoralizing, doubt and regret the awful stepsisters of hope.

All of these cynical and idealistic admonitions are true, of course, and also ignore the many and manifold other reasons to be alive: love, sex, adventure, good books, wine, Brazilian soccer, the Adriatic sea at sunset and more. The world is a panoply of pleasure and meaning if we look for it.

This isn’t lost on young people, anyway, but if we had their attention and could lodge one nugget of wisdom in their brains, what would it be? What advice, from those who have made the passage, to navigate the shoals and deep oceans of their lives? What warning?

We would not, like President Trump, whine that life was unfair and people were mean. Nor would we, like Hillary Clinton, admit to failure and urge others to keep fighting anyway. We couldn’t say, as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did in their commencement addresses, “robots,” both as warning and promise.

Instead, we would point to the very person sitting in the chair, draped in cap and gown, and say: You are the enemy and the savior of your own life. It is your failings and certainties that will lead you off the cliff or away from it, into the swamp and back out, through relationships that endure or fail and toward work that is desert or oasis. This is the good news and the bad.

We are like skiers, swooping back and forth across an invisible fall line, the center of which is within us. The mountain rises and falls, we lean in, we pull back, but if we are smart, we will try and see the whole run and let go.

We do each have a destiny; in short, one that we can ignore or serve, avoid or discover. It is built in, a hardwired DNA, and if we pay attention to it, to the inner thrumming of joy, the dead-knowing of purpose, then we will be all right. If we don’t, our very promise will punish us.

And then there are the distractions, many of which are not to be missed. Even the boring parts, as Alfred Hitchcock once said, are part of life; movies are the only place we take them out.

Since we aren’t adding to global warming in our virtual speech, we won’t end by quoting John Lennon or Satchell Paige. Instead, we’ll remind today’s graduates what surgeons and rock climbers all say: It is better to be lucky than talented.

And, of course, write if you get work.

FILE PHOTO High school graduation is a time of triumph — and a time when young people become adults.