Hi! I just got this in my email at work and thinks its great! Enjoy!
Get a Life
> The following is an excerpt taken from the
> commencement speech by the writer, Anna Quindlen, to
> the graduates of Villanova University this last year:
>
> "I have no specialized field of interest or expertise,
> which puts me at a disadvantage talking to you today.
> I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life
> is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life
> and your work. The second is only part of the first.
> No man ever said on his deathbed, "I wish I had spent
> more time at the office." Don't ever forget the words
> my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win
> the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John
> Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway
> of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are
> busy making other plans."
>
> You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one
> thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of
> people out there with your same degree; there will be
> thousands of people doing what you want to do for a
> living.
>
> But you will be the only person alive who has sole
> custody of your life.
>
> Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just
> your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a
> car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your
> mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank
> account but your soul.
>
> People don't talk about the soul very much anymore.
> It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a
> spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter
> night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or
> when you've gotten back the test results and they're
> not so good.
>
> So here's what I wanted to tell you today:
>
> Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the
> next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger
> house. Do you think you'd care so very much about
> those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or
> found a lump in your breast?
>
> Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water
> pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a
> life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk
> circles over the water or the way a baby scowls with
> concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with
> her thumb and first finger.
>
> Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people
> you love, and who love you. And remember that love is
> not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone.
>
> Send an e-mail. Write a letter.
>
> Get a life in which you are generous. And realize
> that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no
> business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about
> its goodness that you want to spread it around.
>
> It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned
> to live many years ago. Something really, really bad
> happened to me, something that changed my life in ways
> that, if I had my druthers, I would never have been
> changed at all. And what I learned from it is what,
> today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all: I
> learned to love the journey, not the destination. I
> learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that
> today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to
> look at all the good in the world a nd try to give
> some of it back because I believed in it, completely
> and utterly.
>
> And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others
> what I had learned.
>
> Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal
> illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy
> and passion as it ought to be lived.
>
> "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we
> take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
