The greatest challenge is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Yale Student’s Final Essay Goes Viral After Fatal Car Accident | NewsFeed | TIME.com

 Be Here Now:

 Fate can be cruel.... the Yale student's letter is akin to the "Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch that also went viral on the internet.  The difference being he was facing his demise and offering his acquired wisdom while she was looking expectantly to a promising future and a long life..
 This blog is dedicated to enjoying life by paying attention to the moments that make up our lives... 

 To be mindful of wise words like these offered in a Sanskrit Proverb:

Look at this day, for it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the realities and verities of existence, the bliss of growth, the splendor of action, the glory of power.

For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision, but today, well lived, makes every day a dream, a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
 
Look well, therefore, to this day.
Life is more manageable taken one day at a time and lived fully by enjoying the journey.   We are always on the way somewhere from youth to old age.  Change is a constant to which we are always adapting by flexible responses and creative thinking.  It is easy to forget to have gratitude and reverence for life.
 
The Bible tells us:  "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."  in Matthew 24:36 and it is hard to disagree.


Virgil put it this way:

"Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore."
But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail.
--- Giorgics, by Virgil
 


Yale Student’s Final Essay Goes Viral After Fatal Car Accident | NewsFeed | TIME.com

In her final essay to her classmates, 22-year-old Yale student Marina Keegan penned an ode to life at the university she was preparing to leave. At the time, no one knew it would be her final essay altogether.

Keegan was declared dead at the scene of a car accident.

The promising young English major had been the president of the Yale Young Democrats and an active part of her college’s branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A promising writer, she had already penned articles for NPR and The New York Times and blogged for The New Yorker, where she was set to start work as an assistant to the general counsel in June.

“She was so excited she was going to start work there — that’s all she talked about,” her mother Tracy Keegan told the New York Daily News.

But the most affecting part of Keegan’s legacy is the essay she wrote for a special edition of the Yale Daily News that was distributed at the college’s commencement ceremony.

Titled “The Opposite of Loneliness,” — which the Yale Daily News  published online following Keegan’s death — it’s a buoyant, earnest and hopeful rumination on life during and beyond college.

Hope and Promise:
"Let’s make something happen to this world.”
 
 Expectation:
“We’re so young. We’re so young,” she wrote. “ We have so much time.”

Megan Gibson is a Writer-Reporter at the London bureau of TIME.  







Marina Keegan's Article

The piece below was written by Marina Keegan '12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012's commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22. 


We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.
But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves...” “if I’d...” “wish I’d...”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.


FILED UNDER: University
 Source:  Yale U. Cross Campus
 ........................................................................................................................................................................... quotes from Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture – Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (video): 

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.
I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.
You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.
When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Head fake learning is absolutely important, and you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.
The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.
It’s pretty easy to be smart when you’re parroting smart people.
It’s very important to know when you’re in a pissing match. And it’s very important to get out of it as quickly as possible.
Until you got ice cream spilled on you, you’re not doing field work.
I can’t tell you beforehand, but right before they present it I can tell you if the world (his students project work) is good by the body language. If they’re standing close to each other, the world is good.
If you’re going to do anything that pioneering you will get those arrows in the back, and you just have to put up with it. I mean everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Somewhere along the way there’s got to be some aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams. First one is the role of parents, mentors, and students.
And he (Andy Van Dam) said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.
You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore.
I have a theory that people who come from large families are better people because they’ve just had to learn to get along.
Loyalty is a two way street.
Syl said, it took me a long time but I’ve finally figured it out. When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. It’s that simple. It’s that easy.
You can’t get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest.
I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.
Apologise when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.
Don’t bail. The best of the gold’s at the bottom of barrels of crap.
Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it.
Don’t complain. Just work harder. That’s a picture of Jackie Robinson. It was in his contract not to complain, even when the fans spit on him.
Be good at something, it makes you valuable.
Find the best in everybody. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out.
Be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.
It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.




Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams



Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Carnegie Mellon University












Yale Student’s Final Essay Goes Viral After Fatal Car Accident | NewsFeed | TIME.com