Dr. Paul Cravath, a 1962 graduate of Chosen Valley High School, gave the Commencement address at graduation ceremonies held on Sunday, June 1, 1997. Dr. Cravath graduated from Luther College in 1966, deferred entrance to the University of Minnesota Law School and accepted a Fullbright Tutor Grant to India. He taught English at the University of Indore and studied contemporary Indian film. In 1967 he taught English as a second language in Tokyo and returned to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Theatre. In 1970 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing from Tulane University in New Orleans and for a year taught creative dramatics and history in Washington, D. C.
In 1971 he received a teaching assistantship as a doctoral candidate in the Asian Theatre program at the University of Hawaii, and having completed his language requirement in Mandarin, he eventually received his Ph.D. in Asian Theatre in 1985.
From 1979-1981 Dr. Cravath was a guest professor of theatre at Tulane University and from 1975-1977 acted and directed professionally with the Hawaii Theatre Festival. From 1981-1984 he lived in a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Honolulu as assistant to the Tibetan lama. Since 1988 he has been a professor of drama at Leeward Community College overlooking Pearl Harbor, and half of the plays he directs there are original works based on Hawaiian mythology, history, and contemporary social problems and include elaborate performances of hula, the Hawaiian sacred dance.
Dr. Cravath returns to Chatfield each summer to visit his parents Mr. and Mrs. Russell Cravath but has maintained residence in Hawaii for the past 25 years.
June 1, 1997
Good Afternoon!
A man who was once scheduled to give a commencement address much like this one, received some advice from an old Irish priest. He said, "Think of the commencement speaker as the corpse at an old-fashioned Irish wake. They need you to have the ceremony, but nobody expects you to say very much."
So I'll take that advice this afternoon and be brief. First and foremost I'm here to say "Congratulations." Congratulations to the Chosen Valley High School Class of 1997!
You've worked hard to get here and you've done well, and the reason we're all gathered here today is to honor you and wish you the very best on your life's journey.
Congratulations also to the teachers and families and friends who supported and encouraged and probably sometimes put up with you graduates. No one accomplishes much alone in this world and today is a day for each of you on top to congratulate those who lifted you up.
And perhaps the greatest congratulations of all on this day should go to the parents. They too have been educated by the process of your growing up. They have understood the parents' dilemma of teaching you to be independent while knowing that you might be hurt. And they have lived long with the contradiction of making all kinds of parent noises to protect you while at the same time assisting you inevery way to take flight. As the songwriter put it, they have been "the wind beneath your wings."
So I hope all of you graduates will join with me in congratulating your parents, grandparents, and the parental figures in your lives.
Now that the congratulations have been made, I'm obliged by tradition to offer you some words of wisdom as you commence your young adulthood. I suppose some speakers at this point might urge you to follow the path they have walked and suggest that by becoming a scientist or an engineer or by studying computers or getting a Bachelor's degree you will pave the way to a bright and happy future.
Certainly that kind of education is valuable both for yourself and your community and many of you are prepared to follow such a path.
But speaking as an artist, as someone who sees all of life as drama with all the roles on the impermanent state of this life equal in their integrity, I encourage you to give maximum power to your performance -- whatever it is -- for the sake of maximum satisfaction. But how?
Yesterday I looked at all your pictures in the Chatfield News -- which demonstrates, by the way, how pround this community is of you -- and I felt, as anyone looking at those pictures must feel: "what a strong, confident, smiling, attractive, and intelligent collection of young people!"
And to me: 71 actors about to perform the next act of an exciting drama.
But the question I ask is "how can you give maximum power to this performance and gain maximum satisfaction from this play you're performing?"
So far as I can tell, the best answer is the advice of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a college professor and probably the world's foremost expert on mythology. But more importantly, he became the voice for a generation of people who say "life is too short to be small."
Joseph's Campbell's philosophy can be summed up in three words and those three words are my advice to you for all of your life: Follow ... your ... bliss.
Follow your bliss. No, it doesn't mean "if it feels good, do it." Follow your bliss means to follow a course in life that is most exciting and challenging for you. Follow a direction that brings you the greatest personal and professional satisfaction, and everyone will benefit.
But how do you follow your bliss? What do you do or not do to find satisfaction on your personal path? Certainly the ways are innumerable, but let me suggest just three.
First I encourage you to pay attention to your intuition, that little voice that doesn't really live in your brain or your heart but rather gives you a feeling deeper inside. In your guts. We call it a voice, but it doesn't use words.
Here's one way to encourage it. If you face a challenging decision about a choice you have to make, close your eyes and experience both possibilities in this way: First, imagine you have just made a commitment to Choice A. This commitment will evoke a certain feeling in you -- it might feel tight or heavy or deadening. Or it might feel enlivening, exciting and stimulating. Then try Choice B on for size. Imagine you have just committed to that option. This will also evoke a particular gut response within you. And one alternative will probably resonate in a feeling (even a little hint) of more lightness, or relief, or confidence. This is the direction to take.
When I was 22 years old I had to make a choice like this. I could go to law school as my parents had wished and as I was prepared to do. But with no great joy.
Or I could enroll in a master's degree program in theatre even though I had never previously taken a theatre class anywhere.
Somehow, never having heard of Joseph Campbell, I followed my bliss and vocations I never knew existed opened up one after the other.
Your intuition, that quiet little voice inside -- easily drowned out by the words "I should" -- that intuition is the source of all art, all creativity, all dance, all music, all performance, all inspiration, even in science. Rene Descartes, the father of the scientific method, the formula upon which our entire technological world is built, received the method in a dream, one of the strongest forms of intuition.
So play your hunches. That little voice is like a playwright writing the best possible script for your life if you just pay attention.
A second method of following your bliss which I would recommend is to see the world with fresh eyes whenever possible. One of the best way to do that is by travel. When I was 21 I went to India, and one of the main things I learned there was who Americans are. I saw my distant home with new eyes.
Your class motto is "Shoot for the moon; even if you fail, you'll land among the stars." This is good. But what if you don't fail?
If you do land on the moon or even if you just orbit the earth -- commercial tickets for that are supposed to be available this decade for about $10 million a ride -- if you do succeed, then look back at earth and you will know that by stepping outside your world in any way you travel, you gain fresh vision and a deeper satisfaction about who you are.
Travel anywhere. You look like people who would enjoy Hawaii.
My last suggestion for following your bliss is to notice where you fail. Joseph Campbell said, "where you stumble, there your treasure lies."
If you aim at the moon and miss, you've actually gained the knowledge of how much you need to adjust the trajectory in order to succeed the next time. Where you stumble becomes an opportunity to learn and grow.
Consider a man who stumbled a lot but was determined to become a public servant. He ran for the state legislature and lost. He ran for Congress and lost. He ran for the Senate twice -- and lost both times. After all these failures, he even tried for a political apppointment as a state land officer, something like a Justice of the Peace, and he was flatly rejected.
Yet this guy held to his vision of public service, and in 1860 he was elected President of the United States.
The man, of course, was Abraham Linclon.
Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Edgar Allan Poe, Percy Shelley were all expelled from school at one point. They all failed. Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team. In the theatre we have numerous tales of successful actresses and actors told they might as well exit stage left, permanently. But all of these failures were, in reality, people just stumbling while following their bliss.
But I think I've made the point. Except for a brief word about money. Sometime when considering your options, ask yourslef the question "what would I do even if I weren't getting paid for it? I suggest that if you do what you love, the money will take care of itself. So follow your bliss, and you will have a rich, full life. Follow after money or power, you may lose it and have nothing, Or worse, you may get the money and power and still have nothing.
It's like the executive who felt unfulfilled. "I climbed to the top of the ladder," he said, "and suddenly found my ladder was against the wrong wall."
Find the wall that turns you on and climb it. That's my advice.
As a man of the theatre I am the eternal optimist, believing that your dreams are no less powerful or compelling or creative than those of the generations preceding you.
So on this Commencement Day I speak on behalf of all who have gone before you to ask that all the lessons the universe wants you to learn be taught gently and that you are able to follow your bliss all the days of your life.
Good-bye. Good luck. And fare you well.
Thank you
(This speech is based in part on the words of Donald E. Petersen, Alan Cohen and Joseph Campbell.)