To Graduates Today: Both Before and After

At this time, right now, there is an epic story being written into the tapestry of history. The epic so great & full of gravitas, the greatness exceeds that of Gilgamesh.

However, it, the story, even the epic, is also more tragic than the loss of paradise and your journey home is longer than that of Odysseus. Nevertheless, I write as if I speak to the attended, for all who are, and were, present.

The arrow of time pierces the heart and the serrations twist and turn, both creating and exposing our weaknesses — our heel made bare.

In this moment, they, the weaknesses, take hold and call you to attention, and beguile you with serpentine trust to mislead you with Medean bias and the victorious hubris before the altar of a Trojan Horse. Arrows tip and Lilith’s kiss wrestle for your soul as part of a Faustian bargain, dangerously close to Oedipal Fates.

You see, it’s a game of riddles — I’m playing right now. And so are you. There’s a catalog of heroes, can you hear your name? Can you hear the music of the strings of fate woven into knowledge and the power to act?

Fate’s strings are sewn into your story as a foundation of choice. Each choice dictates time’s transcription and, as it relates to you, said time never stops. What you target, or press attention to, combined with the intensity of attention focused on the mark, or bullseye, determines the expedition — the speed by which you seal the mastery of your fate. It is time attended (if such a thing can be called Mastery).

We love this power — we crave it at least. But we hate it, perhaps like Gollum did the ring. Alas, we cannot be rid of this power and even the willpower of a Green Lantern only encircles us with obsession. A collated band of rhythmic circles, cycling pistons that output patterns of action. It becomes the future mummified and still, but in motion at present. The sea of consciousness, your transition into the future, what many have referred to as "adulting," shall feel like a void of meaninglessness, all pleasure and despair. However, with right mind and but one touch of gravity's power you may lead yourself to find yourself within your "self." This one natural or cosmological mercy may save you like Gollum saved Frodo.

Ponder to understand. Be wary of rash conclusions and false urgency — they’re traps. Continue to act in order to create. "Porque todo lo que creo, lo creo y lo que creo, lo creo." Create in order to transform. Thereby lies the reformer’s path. It is the road less taken.

You choose your path at every moment and every second, by the way of which you give your attention. In our age of information, attention is the currency of gods and the product of adoration. Some will say to go ahead and give in to the hubris of your lived innocence.  You will become fruit ripe for the beguiled within bewildered paradisiacal minds.

Will you fall on hands and knees to worship such a god? Will you congratulate yourself upon the altar friezed with your likeness and call all to your attention?

“Look, look, I have so many letters — A’s — so many A’s.” But what have you learned? Or is your image “like a beautiful little fool[?]”

To you, I hope that whatever you do, that you act with an acuity of conscious awareness of the decisions you make, not in fear, but mindful of the point in time of choice and the consequences frayed into the tapestry of the living. Here lies individual authenticity, learning, and experience. In such gardens, failure becomes beautiful and the taste of success so much sweeter.

And how your attention captures its focus, whatever chosen lens it may be, each trade off will frame the composition of fate. So choose. Now. Do not be dictated. Take action. Be different.

"Be you? But, what else can you be?" you might ask.

Can a zombie still be itself? How you answer that question is a metacognitive manifest, a peculiar bitter-sweet irony of an action and a choice. It's even a phenomenological riddle within a game that we called a classroom.

You can discover the, or at least a, truth within. But there are doubts. So many of us are Dorians draped in grey of age undone but seen, crying, "Mirror, mirror in our pocketses, we attend to that which is fair, even fairest of them all."

In such conditions, your mind splits into two faces of the same coin. We “want what’s fair.” That Joker at our bedside whispers to us what to introduce ... "chaos." Instead, if I may, introduce yourself to yourself, be honest too, it’s only the fair fare for such a game as life.

Honesty, honestly, is truth. Right?

Please pay attention here and do not misunderstand my proceeding honesty as it is a dangerous prospect. But to those, who shared my classroom, I trust that choice to you.

You are so insignificant that the potential possibilities of your life well-lived is great in significance.

But dwell on that significance and it will eat your consciousness into the void of self-consciousness with scales and shades of narcissism. You will become a real talking ass on strings, Pinocchio embodied, and lusting after what is real with constructs of artificiality in a supposed age of intelligence like Bronze Agers seeking stone.

In a world of the artificial, some of you will thrive and some of you will not. I write only probabilistically. But I remind you to avoid the mirrored and abstracted digital halls of reality that bind you to an intangible realm of solitary confinement.

Transform the stage of your mind and untape the screws. Center your focus and attend to the choices you make. Therein presents the answer untold, which many of you seek. An answer worth telling can be said and written without saying or writing.

Our time together rings true for me, both the successes and the failures. Thank you for sharing the journey for a time. It was a time together.