President Salovey’s Baccalaureate Address popped up on my FB feed, causing other thoughts to pop up as I read it. It resonated on many levels, with my faith, and with the profession I sometimes see as my calling.
Here are the better soundbites from his speech:
What I am going to suggest to you today, however, is that your purpose in life as a graduate from Yale is simply this: to improve the world. In the Jewish tradition this is called Tikkun Olam, literally to repair the world.
Yale’s culture of service to others — service to repair the world — is indeed legendary and centuries old. As the first official historian of Yale, Professor George W. Pierson wrote, “The horizons have rolled back. But Yale still believes in character and fair play, in the learning and teaching of truth. It remains, as it has always been, a nursery of scholars and a gateway to that life whose test is achievement and public service.”
I am impressed by your sense of obligation. I am overwhelmed by the organizations you have built and the activities in which you have engaged as Yale students in order to be useful and of service to others. They have the potential to improve the world. Many of you have contributed something new by addressing niches where very little light has been shined. But will these efforts be sustained after your graduation, or are they merely lines on your résumés? Will there be progress or back-sliding? Is Tikkun Olam ever actually finished? Is your work ever truly done?
Living a life of meaning and purpose helps others and inspires others, but it also will bring you a kind of happiness [I’d say “lasting joy” is more appropriate] that is otherwise difficult to find.
Remember to give thanks for all that has brought you to this day. Go forth from this place with grateful hearts, paying back the gift you have received here by paying it forward for others. Find that part of the world that feels chipped or bent or broken — and commit yourself, once again, to Tikkun Olam.
His words resonate because I believe in the meaning that emanates from public service. A university lights a fire instead of filling a vessel (WB Yeats), and must truly function as but a gateway to this life, whose test is not merely achievement, but more importantly, how much public service one has contributed.
It hits me now that there is so much wisdom in the old chinese saying, 长大后，做个有用的人。It doesn’t sound like much, but in some ways it is everything. An ethos that forms the building blocks of a better society, and thus a better future for all. 不要做人渣，要服务社会，给归于社会。听似简单，做来非易。
There is further wisdom in these words (paraphrased) “Living a life of meaning and purpose helps others and inspires others, but it also will bring you a kind of lasting joy that is otherwise difficult to find.” There are many who simply seek to maximise wealth and income, but these days I’ve come to realise that the travails of the rich are sometimes much more painful than the struggles of the poor.
There are others who will seek to get away with doing nothing. Or pursuing self-fulfillment in myriad ways that reek of plain selfishness, once it is pared down or distilled.
But I do agree that employment is most fulfilling when there is a larger purpose in the organisation’s mission. However distanced we may feel from it in the daily grind, it is satisfying to realise that all the slog contributes to a purpose larger than yourself, than your immediate family. That it helps serve the community, to repair the world. That it seeks out the part of society that is bent, chipped or broken, and slowly but surely works to mend it.
That is one of the reasons why I enjoy my work. That is one of the reasons why I work.
There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.
Ecclesiastes 2:24 (KJV)
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