Steven Rinella's Commencement Remarks
Good morning everyone. One of the many things that I learned as a writing student here in the late 90s is that it’s important to know and understand your audience; as a way of demonstrating my awareness of you guys, my audience, I’ll say this: I know you want me to get to the point, and to get this over real quick.
So, the point is this: As you sit here today, about to get your hands wrapped around a spickety spanking new diploma, I’m asking you to reach down under that goofy hat your wearing and reach inside of your brain, and pluck out or otherwise destroy, whatever form of a Plan B you’ve built for yourself out of fear that your life’s Plan A doesn’t work out.
What do I mean when I say “your Plan A.” It’s simple. Your Plan A is the thing you dream of doing with your life; it might be the dream that brought you here to the 猎奇重口 in the first place. It’s the thing that comes at the end of the sentence, I want to be a… BLANK. When I was in your shoes, graduating from college, my blank was this: Writer. I wanted to be a writer. That was Plan A.
So then, you might ask, what is the Plan B that I’m asking you to kill? Plan B is everything else. It’s anything that either impedes with your Plan A or seduces you away from your Plan A. Plan B is your fall back plan. It’s the thing you could do that’s a little bit easier than your plan A. It’s a little more certain than your Plan A. It’s less daunting than your Plan A. It’s safer. That’s Plan B.
Let me put this all in terms of cliff jumping in Hawaii. A few years back, a friend in Hawaii took me and my family to a bigassed waterfall on Maui called Waioka. It’s one of those waterfalls where you can jump off these rock ledges down into the bottomless abyss of a plunge pool. There’s a lot of jumping ledges above the plunge pool that you can choose from. But there’s one ledge that has everyone’s attention because it’s the big high ledge.
My daughter Rosemary, who’s here today, got it into her mind to jump off that big high ledge. It became her Plan A. No one else in our party had that Plan A. But she climbed out there on that ledge and man, it was scary. She’d picked a terrifying plan A. But here were a lot of Plan Bs. Lower, less scary Plan Bs ledges. Three or four of them, some just a little hop into the water.
The whole time we were there, you’d see people lean out over that high ledge and say, not for me, and then move down to their appropriate lower ledge – Their Plan B. But Rosemary stayed up there in pursuit of Plan A, for a long time. Twenty minutes. The bitch about the position she was in, up there in pursuit that scary Plan A, is all you can think about is how bad it’s gonna hurt if you don’t land it right. It’s gonna hurt, and someone’s gonna laugh at you. And maybe they're already laughing at you because you had the audacity to climb up there in the first place. They’re jealous and they want so bad for you to step down to a lower Plan B ledge, one where they themselves would feel comfortable. Or else they’re hoping you jump… and break your back.
The discomforts of perching up there on your Plan A, with no idea what’s gonna happen to you, are many and varied. The bulk of you out here today are finishing your four year degrees. When I finished mine, I traded a Husqvarna 252 chainsaw and $250 for a 1989 Ford Econoline van and drove out here to this school for the MFA writing program. I applied for a teaching fellowship but didn’t get it. Instead I ended up with a job scrubbing toilets in the Liberal Arts building 400 yards southwest of here. We cleaned bathrooms in the evening, right exactly when they scheduled a lot of the writing workshops that my classmates, many of them Ivy Leaguers, were in. It was common to be in there scrubbing out a pisser and here comes a fellow graduate student waiting to take a leak. It always struck me how it’d make both of us uncomfortable.
That was just one of those many, Plan A perils, the kinds of things that make you say, To hell with it, and climb down to the ease and comfort of Plan B.
You probably guessed where this story about my daughter Rosemary is going. Yes, she jumped. But I’m not going to tell you what happened when she landed. In the writing biz, we’d call all this stuff about cliff jumping a metaphor. But you guys aren’t far enough in life to worry about the landing part of the metaphor. For now, you gotta worry about picking that high ledge, and having the bravery to climb out there. You gotta have the bravery and strength to be able to stand up there and handle the terrible fear of failure. And when you land, no matter what happens, I’ll be there to applaud you. I jumped a long time ago. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be up here in front of you now.