This note is typically essentially a commencement speech. A few years ago, it was the speech I gave to graduating seniors in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. This year, I was asked to give two commencement addresses, one to seniors in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at GW (where SMPA lives) and one to Master's and PhD students at Shepherd University in West Virginia. You can watch the Shepherd speech here and read it here.
The messages were different, and each had specific references that don’t make a lot of sense out of the context of the university. I’ve tried to combine them into one coherent reflection here. A bit of a clunky transition, clearly two speeches duct-taped together, but hopefully both coherent and commencement appropriate.
Class of 2025, your time in college hasn’t always been easy. But none of you are here to do easy things. You’re here because you wanted to tackle hard problems, to challenge yourselves, and to be challenged. You wanted to be in the thick of politics, policy, and creative and intellectual excellence. For some, college is a way of avoiding a storm before having to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. For others, for you, college is a chance to run into the storm. Good news, the weather is pretty rough.
Seize the storm, stand on firm ethical footing, and remember that to be in community is to be fully human.
You have been told by your professors, parents, and the media that you live in unprecedented times. That’s true. But outside of Paul Loeb’s reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Bill Murray in the classic 1983 rom-com Groundhog Day, all times are unprecedented. You are living in one time, once, and by definition, that time is different from all other times before it and all times to come. There are no precedented times because time isn’t. Time is always about to be, or just was. It's here only for a moment, and the moment's gone. I'll pause here to let your parents hum Kansas’ Dust in the Wind to themselves.
All set? Great, back to it.
We tell stories about our time to make sense of it. We make the unprecedented precedented by saying it is like some other, until-then unprecedented time. We say our politics today are like the politics of the 1890s or 1930s. We say this weekend’s graduation is like the graduations of countless students at countless colleges and universities. We say that we are as they were, and therefore we will become as those who came before us came to be. All very clever and profound-sounding, and mostly fiction. We should learn lessons from the past, just as nothing is ever fully old, few things are fully new. We should look to history, literature, philosophy, art, and politics to help navigate the moment we’re in. But to paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, "You can never step into the same storm twice."
You are telling your story of your life. You will walk out of here into an unprecedented time, and you will make sense of it. You will build and be part of communities, shape and be shaped by your world, you will make the unprecedented the predictable. You can either be the victim of the wind and rain, or you can seize it and say the storm is mine. You are not passengers in time, you are not victims of events. You are storm chasers.
Now is when people like me in speeches like this give you profound-sounding advice pulled from a quotation website and probably misattributed to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill. I’m not going to do that.
Instead, I’m going to give you advice that comes from one of your classmates.
A few weeks ago, Aaliyah Guzman, a graduating senior at GW, wrote a piece for the student paper, The Hatchet, about a difficult decision she made to leave her dream internship. She concluded with advice we should all take. She wrote, "Take time to draw your ethical boundaries. Think about the books, movies, music, and philosophers that have shaped you and your beliefs, and write down what that moral compass is. Then, memorize, study, and know it better than anything else because you want to know it when needed. As you venture into the world of work and internships, ensure that everything you do — from the jobs you take to the assignments you complete — aligns with these boundaries."
Your time is unprecedented, as all times are unprecedented. Your story of your time, your explanation, your sense, is yours, as all times are. You choose who and how you want to be in your time. You are students, soon to be alumni. In your time here, you learned about and lived through storms, literal and metaphorical. Your unprecedented times are yours, just as your unprecedented times to come will be yours. Hold fast to your footing and be true to your compass as you navigate your unprecedented time and the storms that come with it.
This all sounds heroic. Alone against the storm, master of the elements with an inner strength that comes from your mastery of research methods and ability to name-check Immanuel Kant in an essay. But there’s more to it, of course. Standing alone on a rock in the rain is lonely, exhausting, and usually futile. Your strength comes from your conviction, and it also comes from your community.
Community is one of those generically positive and imprecise words that shows up in hiring ads and in speeches like this. Schools like this call themselves communities of scholars, there are community centers, community banks, Community Chest cards in Monopoly, and a sitcom called Community that ran from 2009-2015 in which a corrupt lawyer was punished by being sent to community college. None of which says what a community is.
One easy way to think about community is as some imagined “we” who need to come together to protect ourselves from some imagined “them” who don’t look, sound, pray, love, or vote like we do. That’s more like a Netflix zombie apocalypse series than a community. Another way some people think about community is a group that thinks, acts, and dresses alike. That’s a cult.
The problem with those definitions is that they are based on exclusion; the definitions say, "They are not us."
A positive definition of community is one that starts with who we are together, our connections, our humanity.
Community is the most human thing we do. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that "Man is a political animal." He didn’t mean yard signs and endless TV ads. At least not so far as we know, he died close to 2500 years ago, and we don’t have all of his writings. Aristotle said people need to be part of a community to flourish or achieve eudaimonia. The polis or the city was central to what it means to be human because being together is what humans, by nature, do.
More optimistic than zombies or cults, but not much more useful.
One way to make the word "community" useful is to think about it as a verb rather than a noun. It isn’t a place like the student center. A bunch of people huddled together in the dining hall hiding from zombies, isn’t a community, it’s lunch. Community isn’t a place in which we hide, it is something we build.
In this light, a community is like a garden. It is something we nurture and that nurtures us. Gardens need care and attention. The best gardens have different plants and species, they attract wildlife, bugs, bees, and birds that in turn, help foster and strengthen other gardens. Like a garden, a community is something we create and that creates us. We rely on gardens for food, we find solace in them, we work alone with our thoughts, and with friends and strangers during harvest. We till soil together. We sow and we reap.
Lovely, but still not necessarily useful. So let’s get specific. Here are three ways to foster community.
First, Karen Wickre, author of Taking the Work Out of Networking, says she hates networking because it feels fake and transactional. Instead, she remains genuinely curious about other people, and she likes to make connections. She has a lot of good advice, it’s a terrific book. One of my favorite tips is the importance of reaching out for no reason. If someone occurs to you, let them know. Text or call, send a DM or a postcard. "You were on my mind" is a good enough reason to drop someone a note. No one ever got upset that they got a random text from someone they haven’t heard from in a while. Nurture your garden.
Second, as Wicker writes, "Don’t talk yourself out of the help you need." If you need ideas for recipes, vacations, a good mechanic, a job, career advice, a shoulder, or an ear, whatever, ask. Reach into your network. Let people help you, as you are willing to help others. Let your garden nurture you.
Third, one of my favorite approaches to community is the last-minute invitation. Invite people to get together on the spur of the moment and for no reason. Say you’re ordering pizza, and do they want to join. Call someone and say you’re going for a hike or a picnic. They may say 'no', but asking matters, and they might even say yes. Enjoy and share your garden.
There are countless other ways to foster community. Join a recreational sports league or regular pickup game. Start or join a book or movie group. Volunteer at your church. You don’t have to pick the perfect thing or the best thing, you just have to do something. Show up and invite others to join you. Authentically, honestly, and fully, show up. And when others show up, welcome them. Hand them a paintbrush or pass them the ball, ask what they’re reading or watching. Don’t ask what they do, who they voted for, or where they go to church. Offer them a seat at your table. Ask if they can help carry the load. Invite them to nurture and be nurtured by your garden. Invite them to flourish in community, because as Aristotle wrote more than 2,000 years ago, flourishing in a community is what it means to be human.
The only ways to fail are to do nothing, to pick the fruit but not turn the earth to take without giving, to lock the gate, or fail to make room at the table.
Your community is a refuge from the storm. Nurture it, be nurtured by it, and invite others to come in out of the wind and rain.
Be well, do good, and keep in touch.
Peter Loge
Peter Loge
Director, School of Media and Public Affairs