May 3, 2025
Graduates, President and First Lady Holoman, Trustees, Faculty, Staff, honored guests, and proud families—it is an honor and a pleasure to be with you on this special day.
The Centenary mission statement is brief, but it packs a lot in: Centenary College prepares global citizens to live productive lives of vitality and purpose.
That’s a powerful aim. How fortunate you are to have been cared for by these people in this place—all aimed at helping you live out this mission. You leave here prepared to be responsible citizens of the world. You have the skills to live with purpose and in ways that produce benefits for others. And you are ready to engage the world with vitality.
I am especially struck by the notion of vitality as an aim of your education. It’s an unusual word to find in a college mission statement. It captures something unique about the Centenary experience—something precious and rare. The education you received here—the learning you did in the classroom, the laboratory, the field, and the dorm—is intended to make you smarter and more productive, but also more alive. More exuberant. More fully human.
I came to know my own vitality best during the painful periods when it collapsed. Twice in my life I have found myself merely going through the motions—alive in a biological sense but drained of any meaningful life force. The first was early in my career as a philosophy professor when I was struck with writer’s block. I could muster up a bunch of platitudes and type up a bunch of words, but I couldn’t make my writing or my thinking feel “alive.” I found the solution on the analytic couch where over many months I learned how to stay in contact with my unconscious desires and dreads. When I stopped worrying about perfection, a more authentic voice emerged. My writing and my living became enthused, that is, re-filled with living breath and energy.
I lost my vitality again years later as I battled breast cancer. It wasn’t the frightening diagnosis that flattened me, it was the debilitating side effects of the cure. Chemotherapy cured my cancer, but it stole my sense of aliveness. It made me into a ghost haunting my kitchen and my office. As my treatment ended and my body healed from the chemical assault, I visited an acupuncturist. The first few visits were a wash. I felt nothing. Not the needles. Not the chi. Not even my own heartbeat or breath. But the third time. Oh my goodness. Suddenly my cells were abuzz. Everything had a pulse—in me and around me. That day, and over the next few months, I could feel the life force returning.
These vitality crises left with me a deep appreciation for the fragility of our sense of being alive. They also left me much more attuned to the ebbs and flows of vitality in our daily lives. It’s all too easy to pass through hours and even days in a kind of trance.
Here we are: these miracles of millions of years of evolution and the crashing together of atoms. The billions of events—directed by G-d or nature—that had to happen just as they did in order for you and I to be alive and together in this very moment. It fills me with awe just to think about it. And yet…. we mostly don’t think about it. We waft around with our devices. Heads down. Thumbs busy clicking and pinging. Spending time in an alternate reality of dissociated images and bits of information. It may not be the worst way to live. But I don’t think it is the best way either.
Vitality thrives in the realm of experience that some philosopher’s call “the Real.” That is, our embodied, animalistic immersion in the strange field of bare Being. That’s the realm into which we are born—a confusion of sensations—and which continues to undergird every moment of our lives. As we grow into human culture, and especially as we take our place as language users, the Real gets covered over with layers of symbolic and imaginary thinking. The words we use allow us to think big thoughts, control nature, and harness time. But they also cut us off from the awesome plenitude of pre-linguistic being that imbue our words and thoughts with vigor and vitality.
Think, for example, of the difference between the raw, ragged feeling of an empty belly and the comparatively constrained phrase “I’m hungry.” The most important words always fall short. Can “love” encompass the magnitude and multiplicity of the feelings it names? Can “blue” convey the beauty and felt wetness of the sea or the sky? The poets among us come closest to bringing the Real into language. But each of us can pause and really experience the fullness of the hum that forever resists representation.
Losing track of the Real is painful, but it also has political and ethical consequences. When we allow our language to soar high above the Real of material experience, we are in danger of substituting symbols for humanity. In Nazi Germany, “Jew” referred not to the actual embodied existence of Jewish neighbors and friends but to a decontextualized symbol of decay and threat. In the United States, the word “slave” enabled the buying and selling of fellow human beings by replacing the felt experience of encountering another person with a language of commodification. In our own moment, we struggle to keep terms like “immigrant,” “foreigner,” “liberal,” and “Republican” grounded and attached to actual people with complex lives and histories. When we let those words become disassociated symbols, we make it harder to find empathy, room for connection, and justice. We wind up calculating with dispassion and acting without feeling. Empty symbols are convenient, but they erase our vitality.
Similarly, the ubiquity of visual images that is endemic to modern life also carries special risks to vital living. Since so much of our experience is mediated by photos and screens, we often find that images—and not the actual material reality of experience—become our measure. Which feels more desirable? The piece of cake in front of you? Or the inedible but glossy image of it you post on insta? Who is sexier? The buffed silicone or AI enhanced image on the screen? Or the actual human body and mind of your beloved? Which feels more real? The manufactured, alcohol-fueled drama of reality tv? Or your ordinary Tuesday afternoon? Images are illusions. They hype up the real, giving it a sheen and an aura of perfection and wholeness that is incredibly tempting. It’s why we like our imaginary world so much. It’s designed to appeal to us in just that way. But it drains our vitality. Instead of entering into the messy, unpolished, and uncontrollable realm of the here and now, we retreat into a manufactured para-reality in which we may be comfortable, but we are never fully alive.
As you mark this day on the threshold of the rest of your life as a Centenary graduate, I want to share some tips for protecting your vital energy—ones that I have learned through experience but that I still have to remind myself of every day.
The first is to stay in touch with your deepest desires. That is harder than it seems. It’s a lot easier to take up what other people want than to wade inside and hold fast to what really lights you up. Your Centenary education has helped you by constantly exposing you to new ideas and experiences. You have found aspects of your true calling and your authentic self. But now it’s up to you to stay on the path of discovery and commitment. It’s up to you to sort out the shiny objects from the true gold. So, make time for self-reflection, surround yourself with people who encourage you your unique creative way of living, and push yourself to take the kind of calculated risks that lead to a vital future.
A second tip is to keep your thinking connected to the Real. At Centenary you have been immersed in an atmosphere of reflection, challenged to look at things from multiple perspectives and with the tools of critical analysis. Don’t stop. Don’t let the slogans and symbols of your profession or your politics close you off from the real material ground of experience. Make sure you tie your language to the material world, never forgetting that symbols are always insufficient substitutes for the plenitude of the world. You have to be both professor and student from now on—interrogating your own ideas, not letting yourself off the hook when your reasoning is sloppy, and yes, grading your own efforts.
And finally, nurture and protect your capacity for being fully present. All of the great wisdom traditions recommend this. It is in the here and now that we find a path to the things that are most meaningful. In my own life, I make time for Jewish prayer, for yoga, for self-reflection, and for conscious breathing. These practices keep me grounded and alive to the daily miracles of existence. They ensure that a thread of vitality runs through my work and my life. It’s often hard to tear myself away from the lure of the digital feed. But staying true to daily practices of presence teaches you to hunger for the vitality that only a connection to the Real provides.
On this special today, you are held in a circle of love. I can feel the rays of hope and blessings from your families and from the Centenary faculty and staff who have committed themselves to you and to generations of students like you. Take a moment to feel the reality of that love. Bask in it. Appreciate it. Let it be an anchor in times of struggle. The world desperately needs what Centenary graduates have to offer: a global perspective; a sense of your responsibilities as citizens; and the capacity to live productive lives of vitality and purpose.
May you be blessed in this moment of transition and may your vital energy sustain you and those who know you.