This past weekend at my fraternity, we started the pledge process. As a brother in the fraternity, I am not too happy about this. I’ve gotten to be possessive over our brotherhood, and by that I mean who can join/who deserves to be in it. Needless to say, I am unhappy with our pledges so far, but that’s okay because when I was pledging, the brothers weren’t happy with me or the other pledges either.
We began with a walk around campus. Each pledge has to walk to designated locations on campus and meet with a brother. The brother has a prepared a few lines to say and a few questions to ask, just to get the pledge thinking about what we stand for and what it means to be in our brotherhood. I was second on this path that the pledges would embark on.
The pledge-master, the brother in charge of this semester’s pledge process, gave me a card with an inspirational quite about ambition on it. He told me to read it to the pledge and ask him what he thinks ambition is. I decided not to do this.
It was a very cold and windy night here in upstate New York and the moon was full and bright. I looked up at that moon and it looked back at me. It stared me down like it has every man, woman, and child before me. This is what I’m going to say, I thought.
So I said to the pledges one by one as they approached me, “Look up at the moon.”
They did.
“How many men before you and me have looked up and seen that same moon?” I asked.
I got answers ranging from "All of them" to "A lot."
The correct and most obvious answer is all of them. Every man who has every lived, and I say man in this instance because this is regarding a fraternity, has looked up and seen the moon. Every one.
Then I asked them, “How many men’s names can you say off the top of your head? Don’t tell me their names, but how many? Five? Ten? Fifty names?”
Most of them said ten or fifteen.
Then I asked them what ambition means to them. And this is the point when I think they just began to tell me what I wanted to hear. And some, if not most, did not understand what I was trying to tell them.
Everything around us, the buildings, the trees, the wind, will outlive us. We will die and they will remain. We are mortal.
And it is those men whose names we can remember off the top of our heads who remain immortal through the ages: Achilles, Alexander, Nero, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, to name a few.
Every man, woman and child has the potential to become immortal, and it is ambition and the will to carry on and succeed that keeps us from being just another number or name on a tombstone.
I wanted the pledges to understand that we all will be forgotten unless we strive to do better for ourselves.
In other words, the moon will remain, but so can your name.
