Graduation Day

2004-04-01T23:17:00.000-05:00

This is not a piece on high hopes for those who are graduating this year, although I bid them well. This is going to be about dreams and aspirations and how our world has somehow shaped what they are supposed to be compared to what they should be and what we know, deep down, they should be. These dreams and aspirations and what we know they should be is what is lost in these times of increased personal insecurity.

Admit it - a large part of who you are and what you want to become is your answer to the call of this world and not of what you truly desire. There is no philosophical wordplay here that has to take place when I say this. For if you feel I am toying with your mind with my words, you are just making an excuse. You, me and everybody are caught in this game of who can be dead set secure about their future. There is nothing wrong with this except for the fact that it is not our nature. I cannot explain your nature nor can I explain the nature of others but all I can say is that we are not being who we are and what we each believe we are meant to be.

Let us look at tests for a moment. Tests are designed to find patterns in thought and behavior among people. Academic tests in school are framed in such a way that the teacher is able to determine whether or not you learned what he or she was teaching you. If your professor sees that you are in sync with the norms that he or she has set then you get high marks. The same is true for psychological tests. The norms that they use are relative to the standards of the test-maker and although there may be so-called culture-fair tests out there the norms remain to be the bar set as what ought to be. Hence, society or groups of people in the society determine your end and your identity or else you fail.

This theory was introduced to me by a professor that I had for a course on leadership. He criticizes schools because our learning has been greatly stunted by the structured learning systems. Teachers, unfortunately, have often fed students information in large quantities to a point where increased consumption of information is the path to being a genius. Teachers teach, students learn. The question is why is our rate of learning way off the charts when we were months old compared to our rate of learning today?

Even at the workplace we are not spared of this deceleration of learning. In our work organizations we are trained to follow a certain way of acting, we are educated in the mission we are supposed to be aiming for and in the vision we are supposed to realize. Organizational theorists believe we are moving to a new age of Taylorism where the workforce is optimized through a revised work structure that employs the advances in organizational behavior.

The point is that each of us have our own story to tell. However this story is about how we have been, in some way, answering to the demands of the society and that it is no easy struggle. Sadly it is this call of society that we answer that has overwhelmed our ability to be in touch with ourselves and what we personally believe we should be doing. This tug-of-war inside ourselves surfaces every now and then when we do reach some level of success where we momentarily ask ourselves, "is this it?" Then we wonder if "this" is the outcome of pursuing what you wanted or what you were made to believe you should want.

I am hoping that each one of us do reach a point of enlightenment at which we are able to unlearn what was taught to us as the "ideal" and where we discover ourselves again. This is the day we graduate from the old school of purposeful thought and to that of meaningful action.

FLiGHT of THOUGHT

Graduation Day