Being an aficionado of Ernest Hemingway, I spend a lot of my time finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Only Hemingway, in his terse, often misunderstood style, could turn a novel about a fishing trip to Spain into a social critique of a whole generation. He opens his classic, "The Sun Also Rises," with a quotation attributed to the cubist poet, Gertrude Stein, saying, "You are all a lost generation." This is then coupled with a troubling passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible that reflects a less than optimistic outlook on life in general, suggesting that life goes on regardless of what one does in his short time on the Earth.
I have often caught myself wondering if we, the Millennials, are a second lost generation that will ultimately reach catharsis amidst the identity crisis placed on us by the expectations of the past. And, today, sitting through the commencement ceremony of my girlfriend's brother, I found the extraordinary in a rather ordinary (and boring) celebration that reminded me that maybe we aren't lost, we just haven't had the opportunity yet to establish who we are and who we want to be, regardless of who everyone else expects us to be.
My girlfriend's brother was receiving his Master's Degree in Business Administration, and I was sitting in the back, checking my phone and trying to discreetly hide my yawns, but toward the very end, something one of the speakers said held my attention. He began to speak, building off a previous speech that had defined our current time period as "dynamic and fluid," a "challenge." I set down my phone as he said, "Time is a section cut out of the great circle of eternity."
This stopped me. This, a response to Hemingway's "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever," turned commencement into a real call for action, passion. Now, I am not a student of Business, but I do remember someone telling me once that the best investment one can make is in relationships because the return is immense. This speech reiterated that fact in my mind. We as a generation are not lost, just challenged, participating in something bigger than ourselves. The speaker continued with a list of 10 investments that had a great potential for return, things from listening to a child's laugh, sitting in the sun on a nice day, to drinking coffee with a "very old person." We as a generation have an enormous capacity for connection. We connect on so many different levels, intellectual, social, personal, physical. Ours is the generation of connection because of social media and the expansive technology at our fingertips. This is a blessing and a challenge. The speaker reminded us that the past cannot be forgotten, but who we want to be is the future, and we create that future. We can face this challenge and set a precedent of good connection, intellectual connection, personal connection, or we can be lost.
But now is the time.
We have nothing to prove to anyone except ourselves, and we can decide who we want to be, even as "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose," and time continues on into eternity.
