Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Failure is an option and joy is worth fighting for.


Below is the transcript of the commencement speech that I gave last year at my cousin's high school graduation ceremony.

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Hello everyone! Of course the first thing I want to say is Congratulations to all of the graduates, all of your hard work has paid off! I'm so excited to be here with you and remember the days that I was here at PHS. Thank you, Class of 2018, for inviting me to come and talk with you, it's a really humbling experience. I wish I could tell you exactly what to do to have the perfect life, but I haven't quite figured that out yet. But, for the next 17ish minutes, I can share some of the things that I do know.

After I agreed to come and talk to you all I started thinking, wait a minute! What useful things do I have to say? So I started asking people for advice. My mom suggested that I watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's commencement speech on YouTube and just memorize that and recite it here tonight. Not terrible advice. Probably not legal but, it was a pretty good speech. Overall though, I thought it would be too awkward to tell you about all of the hours that I spent in the gym preparing for the Mister Universe competition. But I do like what the Terminator did in sharing some tips he learned during his journey. When it comes to achieving goals in life, I can't make that happen for you, but I can share some of the things that I've learned. And I encourage you to seek out this kind of advice from lots of people, not just me and Arnold… especially if you see someone who has been successful in doing the same type of thing that you want to do. Don't be shy, most people are surprisingly approachable when you're interested in something they know a lot about.

I work at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where I'm a research scientist in the Heliophysics Division. Has anyone heard the word Heliophysics before? One? That's pretty good. I had never heard that word until I started working at NASA. Where I worked before we called it Space Physics. But basically it's the study of the Sun's effects on the Earth and the Sun's effects everywhere else in the solar system.

And I remember that NASA hadn't really been on my radar growing up. The first time I remember really noticing NASA was during my last year of high school, around the time when you all were born. In fact, I was visiting my naked baby cousin in the hospital on the day he was born. And don't judge!--you were all naked babies on the day you were born. I was in a waiting room with my family watching news coverage of the Mars Climate Orbiter (super exciting stuff). And they were talking about how there had been a miscalculation and the orbiter had gotten too close to Mars and burned up in the atmosphere. And my grandmother, whom some of you knew, had a little bit of a strange sense of humor and, in fairness to her, it was one of those situations where either you laugh or you cry because the satellite had been destroyed, but she started laughing uncontrollably for like, several minutes, which, of course, basically burned this event into my memory. I'll never forget that NASA failure. And NASA actually has an extremely high success rate. But sometimes the most inspiring stories are actually stories about successful failures. I think one of the most important lessons I've learned in my career is to learn from failures so that even those experiences which could be discouraging end up being stepping stones to future successes.

One of the most successful failures was NASA's Apollo 13 mission. Has anyone seen that movie? If not, you should watch it because the Apollo 13 mission was one of the most amazing moments in American history and I'm so glad they made a movie about it, long before any of you were born, so that we could all be inspired by it. The Apollo program is the program that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. That was Apollo 11. Apollo 13 was a later mission that would also put astronauts onto the moon, except that it never made it there. An oxygen tank exploded two days after launch and put the astronauts in a crisis situation which could have killed them. It's called NASA's most successful failure because it took heroic efforts and a lot of good fortune to get the astronauts back safely. Jim Lovell, who was the commander of Apollo 13, called the mission "a great success in the ability of people to take an almost certain catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery." It is such an awesome and inspiring movie, I highly recommend it.

My brother also gave me some advice. He thought I should spend 4 of my 17 minutes playing the Chewbacca Mom video--has anybody seen that? Well, for the few of you who haven't, it's this lady trying on a Chewbacca mask that was her birthday present to herself and she spends basically a full two minutes scream laughing and saying things like "I'm such a happy Chewbacca!" Now, I'm not going to play that clip for you, you've probably already seen it--it's in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2016 for more than 159 million views--and you can look it up later if you want to. But I really like that theme: I'm such a happy Chewbacca. Because isn't that what we all want? I can stand here and tell you all of the things that you need to do if you want to get a job at NASA some day and maybe that would be useful for some of you. But I'm sure that you're not all planning on ending up at NASA, nor should you. We all have different gifts and talents. But one thing that we all have in common is that we want to live a happy fulfilled life.

Candace Payne, the woman from the Chewbacca mom video, has a book out now called Defiant Joy*, which I'm not plugging because I haven't even read it, but I really like that term, defiant joy. Because joy isn't something that just happens to us if we have the right job and the right family and everything is working out well for us. I'm sure you've seen the news lately about famous people who have taken their lives. They seem like they're living a dream life but they're not happy. Happiness is something internal and not necessarily dependent on external circumstances. Some people seem to have everything they could need to be happy but they still don't feel happy. And there are a small number of people who are still happy even in the most horrible circumstances. That doesn't mean they don't want their situation to improve. It just means that they are able to maintain that interior happiness even when everything is a mess around them. And that's good news for us! It means that no matter what is going on in my life, no matter how difficult my situation is, it is possible to achieve happiness right now. It doesn't have to be something that's always on the horizon, that's always about to happen but never actually does.

Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman living in the Netherlands during WWII. She was eventually imprisoned and died in 1943 at Auschwitz concentration camp. During this time of intense persecution she kept a journal where she talks about interior peace and happiness and how it can be maintained even under the worst circumstances, but that it needs to be fought for. I'd like to read you a passage from her journal. She wrote:

This morning I cycled along the Station Quay enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city, breathing in the fresh, unrationed air. And everywhere signs barring Jews from the paths and the open country. But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact.

They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated, oppressed. By our own hatred. By our swagger, which hides our fear.

We may of course be sad and depressed by what has been done to us; that is only human and understandable. However, our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves.

I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.

Life is hard, but that is no bad thing. If one starts by taking one’s own importance seriously, the rest follows.

It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself. True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself; when we have all vanquished and transformed our hatred for our fellow human beings of whatever race—even into love one day, although perhaps that is asking too much.

It is, however, the only solution. I am a happy person and I hold life dear indeed, in this year of Our Lord 1942, the umpteenth year of the war.

Please remember: "It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself."

There's a really funny blog called Hyperbole and a Half by a woman named Allie Brosh who is pretty open about her struggles with depression. She says that personally she has never thought about ending her life but lots of times she feels like she doesn't want to live anymore. And she talks about when she first started sharing that with her family and friends. One of the things that really surprised her is that rather than her being comforted by them, she ended up being the one doing the comforting. Because they basically started freaking out. And I think this is because, unfortunately, people tend to think of mental and emotional health as either "I guess I'm ok" or "oh my gosh! something is horribly horribly wrong!!" without much in between. And this is the wrong attitude.

I was having some stomach pains recently whenever I ate and so I went to the doctor and she figured out that I needed to start taking a supplement that would help me digest my food properly. Since then, I haven't felt perfect but the situation has gotten a lot better. And nobody freaked out about it. In fact, my family and friends all agreed that it was obvious that I should go to a doctor and see about getting myself treated so that I could feel better. Thankfully, people are starting to develop this attitude toward mental and emotional health. If your car isn't running smoothly then you bring it to the mechanic. If you break your arm then you go to the hospital. My advice to you is that if you think something might not be right with your mental and emotional health, in that case too, you go to someone who could help fix it. Sometimes this means going to a professional, like a therapist, other times you might be helped by talking with an older adult that you know and trust. And don't feel like once you've confided in one person then you're stuck with them. Several of my coworkers regularly meet with a therapist and some of them have met with several different people before settling on someone they felt really comfortable with.

So if it seems like something isn't quite right with your interior state, see about getting helped with that and don't worry about what other people say or think. It's just the smart thing to do. And this is part of defiant joy, right? We need to be a little bit stubborn here and refuse to settle for "ok". We don't want to just be getting by in life. We want to have joy in our life. And it's something worth fighting for.

When it comes to caring for our physical health, it doesn't stop at fixing whatever is wrong with my body. To have the best physical health, I need to eat well and exercise and make it a priority to actually increase my overall level of health. And I would say that, just like we more-or-less know how to eat well and exercise, we all know a lot of things that we can and should do to foster emotional health. Just like with exercise, I need to come up with a routine that works for me, I need to be consistent with it, and sometimes I need to mix things up a little bit so that my routine is still effective. I can't come up with a routine for you but I'm hoping to get you thinking about it--what am I going to do to promote my emotional happiness and fight for joy in my life?

We know some of the things that destroy peace and joy in our lives and we need less of those. Sometimes we have to withdraw a little bit from friends who create drama for us and situations that are continually stressing us out. We also need to avoid substances and behaviors that cause unhealthy stress to our bodies. We also know a lot of things that we can do to promote emotional wellbeing.

Some of the things that we can do are actually so well known that they have become cliche. For example, it really does help to have an attitude of gratitude. But it's something that needs to be practiced regularly. Studies in Japan show that simply having someone sit in an empty room each day and list things that they are genuinely thankful for, one after another, as many as they can think of for 15 minutes or so, dramatically increases the person's joy and peace. This has become an extremely successful type of therapy in Japan and even here in the West some people are keeping gratitude journals.

Journaling in general is well known to help people emotionally. There is something about putting our feelings down on paper that can be even more powerful than talking about them.

Mindfulness meditation is another thing that is growing in popularity. Sometimes we get so busy, we're rushing around all the time and we don't notice beauty around us. Or we're eating our favorite kind of food but we don't even notice what it tastes like because we're scarfing it down in order to move on to the next thing we have to do. Just taking a regular period of time each day to slow WAY down and notice little details, especially going out in nature and really looking at what is around me and noticing the smells and the sounds--this is another way to increase peace and joy.

I even read an article recently that said that cuteness affects our brain in a way that not only makes us happier in the moment but can have a lasting effect. The article says "cuteness may be one of the strongest forces that shapes our behavior – potentially making us more compassionate." Studies have shown that when we see something cute, it causes fast brain activity in regions that are linked to emotion and pleasure. So literally, watching a couple of baby animal videos in the middle of a stressful day can improve our emotional state. And of course there are tons of other things you can do to bring joy and peace into your life and I'm sure you can find things that work for you, but remember, we have to make it a priority and we have to be consistent.

All of this boils down to a process of feeding our hope and feeding our joy. The darker the world seems around us, the more effort we have to put in to feeding our joy. And it's worth fighting for.

So I want to leave you with these two messages. Number 1: Don't be afraid of failure. See it as an opportunity to learn and as a stepping stone to future success. Number 2: Take your emotional health seriously. Strive for happiness now and don't settle for anything less. In short, be a happy Chewbacca. So good luck with the next step of your amazing journey and thank you again for having me here.

*Note that Defiant Joy by Candace Payne is an interactive Bible study program rather than a book.

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