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A Short Guide to a Happy
Life
Anna
Quindlen
Self-Actualization / Self-Help |
Random House | eBook | April 2001 | $11.50 | 0-375-50647-0
EXCERPT
I'm not particularly
qualified by profession or education to give advice and counsel. It's
widely known in a small circle that I make a mean tomato sauce, and I know
many inventive ways to hold a baby while nursing, although I haven't had
the opportunity to use any of them in years. I have a good eye for a nice
swatch and a surprising paint chip, and I have had a checkered but
occasionally successful sideline in matchmaking.
But I've never
earned a doctorate, or even a master's degree. I'm not an ethicist, or a
philosopher, or an expert in any particular field. Each time I give a
commencement speech I feel like a bit of a fraud. Yogi Berra's advice
seems as good as any: When you come to a fork in the road, take it!
I
can't talk about the economy, or the universe, or academe, as academicians
like to call where they work when they're feeling kind of grand. I'm a
novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is really all I know.
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I
have to say. The second is only a part of the first. Don't ever forget
what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had
decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer:
"No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the
office."
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father
sent me 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 to you while you're busy
making other plans."
That's the only advice I can give. After all,
when you look at the faces of a class of graduating seniors, you realize
that each student has only one thing that no one else has. When you leave
college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you
have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you
want to do for a living.
But you are 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 the bus, or in the 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.
Excerpted from A Short Guide to a Happy Life by
Anna Quindlen . Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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