In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we asked a number of scholars, college presidents, and writers to answer this question: If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?

Amy Gutmann | Michael Eric Dyson |Ariel Dorfman | Lionel Shriver | Edward J.W. Park | Donna E. Shalala | Barry R. Glassner | Sissela Bok | Robert Coles | Karla Jay | Bobby Fong

April 24, 2007

Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania

In Tragedy, You Have Made Meaning: Graduates, the great tragedy that occurred here on April 16 mixes the joy of commencement with profound grief. As members of a university community, we seek understanding and naturally want to know: What is the meaning of this tragedy?

In the wake of a senseless tragedy, you made meaning where none can be found, by coming together in a caring learning community. You demonstrated the strength and scope of the human spirit. In the midst of your most intense grief, you taught the world the most powerful and profound lesson that we mortals can learn: We can gather the strength to move forward in the face of even the greatest adversity, but only by supporting one another, by pursuing justice, and by being caring citizens of a caring community.

You refused to be defeated or defined by the tragedy. You found the strength to reaffirm your support of one another, your commitment to justice, and your pride in your alma mater. You learned to translate compassion into action. And you thereby taught the world, which is not only watching but also mourning with you, a lesson that we all must take to heart.

When people from the most diverse backgrounds are bound together by caring communities, uncommon strength can arise from an unspeakable tragedy. For however fragile human life may be, the human spirit — when bound together in a humane community — is far, far stronger than cynics and skeptics are willing to admit.

None of us can end senseless bloodshed once and for all. But you have shown the world a community of higher learning that has got the goods to make life on earth so much better for millions of human beings. What a beautiful memorial to those men and women who cannot be here to rejoice with us. What a perfect expression of the human spirit. Thank you for showing us that there is great hope for humankind.

Posted on Tue Apr 24, 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comment

Michael Eric Dyson, professor of humanities and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of 'Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster' (Basic Civitas, 2006)

Your Dignity Is an Edifying Example: You have been through one of the most unspeakable tragedies the nation has witnessed. You now have an opportunity you neither sought nor could have possibly imagined before terror struck: to forge solidarity with other victims of arbitrary and absurd violence throughout the world. The senseless and gargantuan evil you faced has gripped regions of the globe that war ceaselessly over tribe or political tradition — or God and money and oil and the right to rule or vanquish.

The blood of innocent human beings is spilled in pursuit of ideals whose validity is trumped by the means chosen to obtain them. You are now part of the fellowship of the fractured who can help bring healing to a world addicted to violence — and to the insanely aggrieved who view it as a martyr’s resort.

Your dignity and resolve to march forward in life without bitterness or hate — which proves that you are not the ultimate victims of a madman starved for attention or retribution — can give the world an edifying example of the human spirit determined to overcome the worst that we as a species can offer.

Equally as important, you can link your fate as citizens who suffered in full view of the media to those whose pain and grief are unrecorded and unremarkable because it is routine. You can now find common cause with those nameless and faceless victims of all manner of terror and revenge as they huddle on the corners of their plot of land lacerated by military airstrikes, or in some godforsaken hole in the ground created by guns and bombs.

If you remember them and speak their suffering as though it were your own, you will have transcended your tragedy and taught us all the lesson of our common vulnerability and humanity.

Posted on Tue Apr 24, 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comment

April 23, 2007

Ariel Dorfman, a novelist, essayist, and playwright, and a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University

Use What You’ve Learned: It was not supposed to be like this.

This day was supposed to be different, a day that marked your readiness to journey into the world, a day called commencement because it was all about beginnings, all about starting over and defeating death with what you had learned.

Instead death came to you.

Many say that you were unprepared for the devastation that visited your lives so suddenly. In one sense, they are, of course, right. How to plan for an intrusion of such unexpected violence, how to deal with the contamination of your everyday space and the betrayal of your everyday trust? I understand the shock and the pain. When I was not much older than you are now, I also suffered the unpredictable destruction of my life the day a military coup savaged democracy in my country, Chile. On that September 11, 1973, I watched thousands hunted down, not by a lone gunman but by soldiers with orders to kill and colonels with orders to torture. So I know what it is like to be stalked day after day, year after year, with nowhere to hide. And I also know how hard it is to be healed, how haunted one can still be many decades later.

And yet allow me to suggest that those who think you, the Class of 2007, have not been prepared for this tragedy because you did not anticipate it are also mistaken. What have you been doing at this institution but precisely engaging in the very issues that now threaten to infect and sully your existence? You have studied how the science that brings us so many wonders is nevertheless unable to give us final responses to a number of fundamental questions. You have been challenged by philosophy, by psychology, by history to examine what is different, what is not easily explained, what is doubtful. You have been shaken by knowledge, broken out of the conventions you believed in, made uncomfortable with lies, forced to look into the mirror of yourselves. You have been shaken by beauty, interrogated by atrocity, exploded by languages from faraway places where death comes more easily to the inhabitants and just as unpredictably. If all through these university years you have not learned to ask the right questions about grief and community, if all this time you have not been made wary of the false answers, then I would advise you not to graduate, I would beg you to go back into the classroom and get yourselves an education.

But I don’t think your alma mater — the mother of your soul from now on — has failed you, that you lack the maturity, discovered in books and professors and above all in one another, to survive terror.

And yet the question remains. Did not the murderer among you also come to this place to learn and, specifically, to study and practice literature, a form of humanity that is supposed to arm us, not with weapons of destruction but with the marvelous weapon of the compassionate imagination? Of what use were all the books he read, the stories and plays he wrote, if they did not tame his inner demons?

For me the question is particularly painful because literature has been my calling and my inseparable companion, has helped me to grow into someone more fully human all through the best and worst years of my life.

This, then, is your final assignment, this day when you graduate. Spend time with the literature, the books, the learning, which could not save your tormentor, lost as he was in his ferocious loneliness. Use the wonders of your own intelligence and the rivers of your empathy to become, each of you, the sort of humans who ride into the world determined to create conditions where fewer of your fellows have to face the daily possibility of premature death descending upon them.

Tell the dead you leave behind that you will not be engulfed by fear.

I wager you are more than prepared to face the future.

Posted on Mon Apr 23, 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comment

Lionel Shriver, author of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' (Counterpoint, 2003) and 'The Post-Birthday World' (HarperCollins, 2007)

Question Your Certitudes: Class of 2007, you have learned at least one lesson in your senior year: that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

The eyes of the world have been unpleasantly upon you, yet not for a reason that any of you would have chosen. Do not, therefore, allow the forces of malice and random misfortune to rule your futures or dictate who you are to yourselves. Hold tight to the aspirations you conceived previous to that fateful Monday — to distinguish yourselves in engineering, or architecture, or the arts. To allow your identity or your ambitions to be fatally broadsided by this calamity would hand victory to both a man and a manifestation of nihilism that deserve only decisive defeat.

Some will claim that your university has fallen prey to a wholly modern malady. Those of you who have paid attention in your literature and history classes know better. The sanity of our species has been forever fragile; for millennia, not only individuals but whole nations have descended into madness. Moreover, the history of our race has engendered a constant contest between malevolence and benevolence, between brutality and gentleness. That contest has been close and bitter from the moment your distant ancestors climbed down from trees.

Use your pain as an occasion to choose up sides — to opt for kindness over cruelty, for gratitude for what you have over resentment of what you don’t, for hard-earned recognition for achievement over the cheap celebrity of destruction. Further use your pain to understand the pain of others. For your experience — like that of your friends and teachers who are not, sorrowfully, with us today — is not exceptional. Our world would be so much easier a place to live in if it were.

You are wiser now, and wisdom is a burden. One that education willingly levies, although it was never our intention to make you quite so wise so fast. You will be leery now — of the enigmatic, the strange, the suspiciously quiet. Some measure of leeriness in relation to all others who have not proven themselves worthy of your trust may stand you in good stead

But best to use that leeriness first and foremost on yourselves. Direct your distrust inward. Question your certitudes. Be vigilant for the first signs of vengefulness, envy, grandiosity, self-righteousness, and cravings for the raw, indiscriminate attentions of others in your own thoughts. Never forget that the more fiercely you believe a thing, the more likely it is that you are wrong. The mind is a cave. Yet its powers are only mighty when you crawl out.

Posted on Mon Apr 23, 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comment

Edward J.W. Park, associate professor of Asian-Pacific-American studies at Loyola Marymount University

‘I Hope He’s Not Korean’: All of you will take with you agonizing memories of this spring. But I hope that you and the society you will help build will be able to take on one more challenge.

Let me share with you how some of us experienced your tragedy. When I arrived at work on the morning of April 16, my campus was abuzz with your tragic news. As I busied myself with what every professor does in the course of the day — committee meetings, advising students, attending a luncheon the headlines inserted themselves in ominous and revealing ways.

At first we did not know the identity of the perpetrator. After a discussion about choosing a major, a Latino student quietly shared his anxiety: “God, I hope it’s not a Latino.” Then we heard that the first two victims had been an African-American man and a white woman. “I hope it isn’t a black person,” an African-American colleague told me in the mailroom. “If it is, we’re going to catch hell.”

At a luncheon to welcome prospective Asian and Asian-American students, the fact that the shooter was an Asian man had already entered the conversation. Many in attendance were on edge as they speculated about his ethnicity and immigration status. In an odd game of “guess the shooter,” they didn’t want it to be one of their own: “I hope he’s not Vietnamese,” “I hope he’s not Filipino.” The list went on. By the afternoon, the false rumor that he was a Chinese student from Shanghai took hold. A tiny part of me was relieved that he hadn’t been Korean.

Of course, it wasn’t to be. Seung-Hui Cho’s Korean identity became so firmly fixed that, for a time, it seemed to obviate all other parts of who he was. He was a Korean who battled depression; a Korean who wrote violent plays; a Korean who stalked women. He was, simply, the Korean shooter. The scenario unfolded in predictable ways: Korean and Korean-American students here said they were afraid for their safety, while from Los Angeles to New York, fears of a backlash gripped the Korean-American community. Newsweek reported online that chat rooms “throbbed with hate.”

I was bombarded with voice- and e-mail messages from the news media. Could I comment on the incident? It was as though Cho’s ethnicity itself held the key to his rage. At a faculty meeting, one of my white colleagues said, “I’m so sorry about what happened,” as if I had been in Blacksburg dodging the bullets. Being a Korean-American had become all-consuming.

It goes without saying that race and ethnicity still play a powerful role in American society. For racial and ethnic minorities, especially those of us who are marked by visible reminders of difference, minority status sets us apart as vulnerable. It is revealing that on the day of the shooting, everyone who played the “guess the shooter” game with any sense of personal investment was a member of a minority group. Given our past experiences, we knew that, if the shooter had been white, the responsibility, blame, and anger would have begun with the individual. But for us, the responsibility, blame, and anger also implicated our racial and ethnic identity.

The nation knows that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed the Columbine High School massacre. I hope that the national memory of the heartbreak at Virginia Tech doesn’t stop with these words from an April 17 Voice of America headline: “University Gunman was South Korean Student.”

In your efforts to see beyond racial and ethnic labels, I implore you to draw on your educational and personal experiences at Virginia Tech. In this diverse and multicultural university, you learned about the perils of racism, and you were enriched by sharing your lives with people of diverse backgrounds. Let this empower you to transcend hollow labels so you may understand the individual circumstances that conspired to create this tragedy. Our collective fate as a multicultural nation — committed at once to social justice and to individual rights and responsibilities — depends on it.

Posted on Mon Apr 23, 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comment

Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami

Search for Meaning: Moments of tragedy show us what is at stake in education. In the midst of our grief, our shock, our sense of loss, we are consumed by the question: Why did this happen? Alone among living creatures, human beings have no tolerance for the inexplicable. A major purpose of all we do with our minds and spirits — art, philosophy, science, literature — is to make life meaningful by making it intelligible.

Indeed, we human beings seem to depend on the assumption that meaning and intelligibility are linked. A world that makes no sense cannot be filled with purpose, with achievement, with growth, with joy. Ultimately, this is why we study, this is why we question, this is why we learn. Because the more we understand the world, the more we can be at one with it and with ourselves.

Tragedy is always inexplicable. It frightens us; it takes us by surprise; and it shifts our sense of ourselves and of our place in the world. Those who lost their lives here at Virginia Tech on April 16 were learners. They were people different from one another in countless ways but all working, each in her or his own way, to make the world more sensible, more intelligible.

One of the important things this tragedy can help us see is that learning represents a belief in ourselves and in our innate capacity to overcome the inexplicable. Learning is the opposite of walking away, shaking our heads, and throwing up our hands. Rather, learning is an act of conviction about our ultimate ability to understand tragedy and thereby someday to diminish or prevent it. Make learning your promise to yourselves and to your futures. Learning is an act of hope. Let it illuminate the rest of your lives.

Posted on Mon Apr 23, 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comment

April 20, 2007

Barry R. Glassner, professor of sociology and executive vice provost at the University of Southern California, and author of 'The Gospel of Food' (Ecco, 2007) and 'The Culture of Fear' (Basic, 1999)

Protect Your Perceptions: If you haven’t already done so, start a diary — not a blog but an old-fashioned diary that you write for yourself to preserve your private observations, feelings, and questions about what you have experienced these past several weeks. No one else possesses these, and they will slip away from you faster than you can imagine.

As time passes, even just a few months, and certainly within a few years, those insights, emotions, and perplexities that are so close at hand will almost certainly be redrawn, if not utterly supplanted, by whatever becomes the official set of images and interpretations from the media and politicians.

And they may be altered by the higher meaning that you yourself come to assign to the tragedy. Over time you are likely to find routes away from the overwhelming sense of anger, fear, and pain that have occupied you since the shootings. You may replace those burdens with a sense of purpose. As hard as it may be to imagine today, the tragedy will inspire many of you to grander ambitions than you knew you had.

Some of you will switch your career goals and become grief counselors or medics. Others will commit their lives to finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have access to them. Others will devote themselves to identifying and deterring troubled young people before they get to the point of violence.

Each of these future passions is for the good, but it comes at a price. What you know and feel now may well become a faint memory, distorted through the lens of your new pursuits.

Protect those valuable perceptions while you can. Historians and other scholars in the future will need them to truly understand what happened in Blacksburg in the spring of 2007, beyond the received and settled accounts.

So will you cherish your diaries when your children and grandchildren learn that you were at Tech on that tragic day and ask what it was like.

Posted on Fri Apr 20, 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comment

Sissela Bok, senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies

Create a Space for Peace: You have lived through unspeakable horrors and looked upon the face of hatred. But you have also witnessed luminous acts of self-sacrifice and love and reached out to one another to comfort and console. Now, as you graduate, are there further steps you might take to counter the hatred and murder you have seen at such close hand? What models might there be to show the way?

Two who offer such guidance are Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. King could have been speaking of the crisis you have lived through when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And a suggestion of Gandhi’s can be of immediate help: that we carve out personal spaces, territories where violence will not be usedterritories in the family, in the community, with friends and even enemies, at work as in recreation.

In that personal space, neither Gandhi nor King could have foreseen the violence in entertainment that now comes your way. Your generation has been exposed, as none before, to graphic savagery in films and interactive games mass-marketed to young audiences. You’ve seen films and heard songs that portray murder, torture, and rape as thrilling. You know games that invite players to assume the role of “first-person shooters,” training them to aim with precision, then rewarding them for shooting and eviscerating victims in gory and photo-realistic detail.

Even if there were no such media offerings, that would obviously not wipe out easy access to guns, or poverty, drug addiction, dysfunctional families, mental illness, and other risk factors for violence. But for disturbed and psychologically vulnerable people, a combination of glamorized entertainment brutality and sensationalized news coverage contributes powerfully to blurring the line between fantasy and reality. And for a far greater proportion of people, studies show that heavy exposure to media violence increases fearfulness for oneself and desensitization, or numbing, when it comes to risks to others.

Striving for resilience instead of fearfulness, and for fellow feeling instead of numbness, will help as you carve out spaces in your own lives where violence will have no sway. It will matter, for this purpose, to think through your uses of media entertainment. I doubt that you will ever look in the same way again at films or games that glamorize mass killings. But others do. The most potent influence on young people today is that of the media, with their huge financial stake in enlisting new consumers of violent programming. At the same time, there is growing international cooperation among groups aiming to take a stand against violence, including entertainment violence. Gandhi’s hope, expressed over 60 years ago, still resonates:

We are constantly astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamed of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.

Posted on Fri Apr 20, 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comment

Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Children of Crisis' series

Don’t Give Him Hate: Death, in an ironic and painful way, brings us closer to life — prompts us to ponder its meaning, to wonder what we have aimed to do, to be, and why, during that spell of time given us before we disappear altogether, alive then only in the memories of others. Death is no stranger, though, that visits us at life’s end — rather the occurrence of death, that of others, haunts us throughout out time here: a reminder that some day, some time, our heart’s last beat will occur, our lungs’ last intake of air be accomplished.

Today, here at Virginia Tech, many of you prepare to leave, and a new life beckons, even as memories tell of those who are not here, will never again be here, because a terrible fate has befallen them, a student’s wanton murderousness become for classmates and teachers, 32 of them, an awful destiny. To be cut down in cold blood at the behest of a gun’s trigger pulled, its bullets mercilessly, insistently, crazily brandished, sent forth with a kind of fierce insistence that boggles our stunned minds today, and will do so for decades to come, as people across this land, and others, wonder why. Why the hurried impulse, the declared comments, dispatched to the public through the workings of technology: a final statement, and, yes, horribly, a murderer’s chance to exclaim his reasons across space and time, so that countless viewers, listeners, can become his audience — one so desperately sought, it seems.

As I try to take in what I’ve read and heard of late, what you all here have come to know firsthand and so tragically, my mind takes me back to a 12-year-old girl I got to know when I worked at Children’s Hospital Boston. The year: 1959. She had been hit by a driver, drunk on whiskey, as she crossed the street a block away from her home. When I saw her she was already paralyzed, and all too aware of what life would now hold for her: “They have a name for it , but I say, ‘cripple for life.‘” I got to know her fairly well as a physician, but I was also a fellow human being; I was saddened by what happened to her, and enraged by the heedless assault upon her, wrought by a 25-year-old man who had gone to college and had declared his interest in becoming a lawyer. Instead he was headed for a courtroom and very likely a jail sentence.

What I heard from his victim was this: “I feel sorry for him. He must be in some kind of trouble, to do that, get drunk, driving and hitting a kid, then driving off. At least someone saw it all happen! At least he was caught — but I keep thinking this: If you do something like that, you’ve been captured — because you’ll never forget what you did.”

At that, I stood near her bedside, neurological hammer in hand, ready to do my medical bedside work, but halted, wondering: What did she mean, “captured”? By whom? How to ask her a question, follow up on her (to me) unnerving, hard-to-fathom comment? Then her voice — she had read my face and was ready to respond: “In church they talk of the Devil — that it has slippery shoes. That guy, he’d become the Devil, and his car’s tires became his shoes, you could say. He hit me and ran — like the Devil does. Now, I think of him and one minute I say good riddance, and the next I think he’s punished himself pretty bad, and he’ll get his comeuppance (my mom says) when he meets the good Lord and gets sent for a long time of burning.”

Silence then, and a look from her, directed at me. I realized later that she must have sensed my doctor’s mind, my shrink’s head, at work — so this: “I won’t give him hate — like my mom said. Then he’ll be the winner. He hurt me, but look what he did to himself: ‘a guy who could have been good, gone bad, really bad,’ my dad says over and over. He knows the guy’s family.”

“So endeth the lesson,” as we hear said in churches and synagoguesa hurt youngster still teaching her onetime bedside doc, even as he stands here among you at this fine Virginia educational institution, remembering a youngster’s stoic bravery in the face of tragedy, and, in doing so, thinking of you as you go forth with life ahead of you, with painful memories, yes, but with the determination to show yourself and the world what resilience we humans can find in ourselves, drunken drivers and mass murderers notwithstanding. May the good Lord bless all of you, all of us here in this strong and generous nation we are lucky to call our own.

Posted on Fri Apr 20, 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]

Karla Jay, professor of English and women's and gender studies at Pace University

Help Those You Fear: How can you ever forget an alma mater where more than 30 of your fellow students and faculty members died violently? How can you ever leave behind the popping of bullets and the face of the killer burned into every cell of your brain? How do you go on from here?

I asked myself similar questions when I returned to Pace University after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center destroyed part of our campus in Tower One and vaporized 40 of our students and alumni. All that is left of them is a large ragged wound where the buildings once stood, a commemorative plaque in the university’s courtyard, and visions of the buildings imploding over and over in the dreams of almost everyone who witnessed the event.

Survivors never escape the fragility of life or the knowledge that we could have been victims as easily as anyone else, had the site shifted by a building, had the tragedy happened an hour later, or 10 minutes earlier. At the moment of tragedy, we are sure that life will never be the same. Ironically, for most of the students, faculty, and staff at Pace in 2001, life has gone on much as before. Students go to class, professors grade papers, and administrators assess it all. We still date, marry, divorce, have children, take on new challenges, and lose loved ones in time-worn ways.

Yet life after 9/11 has never been the same, and nor should it be for you after the murders on your campus. For me personally, life has become more meaningful. I have continued my work as an activist, but I no longer see academe and “community” as two separate entities. Now many of my courses involve outreach to immigrants, battered women, people with HIV and cancer, the elderly, and others. I stress to my students the need to move beyond our fears and reach out to people who are different from us.

Those who witness senseless violence can never forget, must never forget, for if we do, then the victims will have died in vain.

So, too, can the graduating and current students of Virginia Tech, including the more than 700 members of its cadet corps, now understand how violence and terror affect the innocent. More than 200 Iraqis, also guiltless bystanders, were blown up the very same week of the murders at Virginia Tech in senseless, brutal acts of terror. While you were attending classes, Iraqis shopped for food. Are the two worlds so very different? If we treat individuals or groups of people as our enemies, those people have no choice but to be our enemies. If we hate them, they will demonize us. We cannot kill or simply ignore the weirdos at home or the people whose ways we don’t understand abroad. We can never look away from or ignore such people again. In the end, we must do the hardest thing — help those we fear, so that we may live in peace.

Prayers may help the dead, but both faith in humanity and positive action can heal us all.

Posted on Fri Apr 20, 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comment [1]

Bobby Fong, president of Butler University

You Were Not Alone: Your time at Virginia Tech has been about more than the accumulation of academic credits. It has, I hope, prepared you to live a flourishing life intertwined with the well-being of others. That preparation has come from drawing lessons from all your experiences, happy and sad, fruitful and frustrating, sweet and bitter, including the experience of that tragic day, April 16th. One lesson I hope you will carry with you from that day and its aftermath is that you were not alone. Your family and friends worried about you. Virginia Tech was not alone. The concern of fellow universities, and the nation itself, was focused on Blacksburg. As individuals and as a hurting community, you were the recipients of our thoughts and prayers. Remember this, for in the times of desolation you will experience in the future, you never will be truly alone. Those who love you will care. Even strangers will be kind. In the depths of misery, there will be cords of compassion to draw you back to others.

This is not to deny the presence of tragedy, hate, and evil in the world into which we send you. Life can be dangerous, full of risk. But to respond to life with fear is to diminish yourself. Resolve, rather, to treat every precious moment of your life as a bounty to be spent with generosity and joy. You have already learned that, with the help of others, you can be brave in affronting the challenges life will throw your way, and learn to ride out its storms. In word and deed, encourage one another. As others will be there for you, you in turn will be desperately needed by others. And you will have something to give them because of what others have given you.

In your years at Virginia Tech, you have accumulated knowledge, skills, and wisdom, not simply to make a living, but to make a life. Your experiences at this beloved university contributed to the fashioning of your best self. All the experiences, even those of that terrible day. Redeem the memory of that day by using it as a spur to live fully the gift of the life you have. The world awaits the hope and meaning that you will bring to it.