To all the graduating seniors of 2024 I ask you: Who are you?

Yes, you have a name, but who are you? Back in the day when I was a college student we had a radio station on campus. I was fortunate enough to have a 30-minute program and was allowed to script it myself as long as I kept it interesting. My English teacher told me to write a famous author and ask for advice.

I wrote that letter, only I included the other students in my class. Only one responded and his response was awesome!

“Dear High School graduating class of 1955 and all who have taught these students: I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make many public appearances anymore because I now resemble nothing more than an iguana.

“My advice is simple: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, and essays, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it from this day forward for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of your teacher, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and so on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Here’s an assignment for tonight, write a six-line poem, about anything, but rhymed. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or your teacher. OK? Then tear it up in tiny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash bins. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

He further stated that when he was 15 he spent a month working on an archeological dig and was talking to one of the archeologists one day during their lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people:

“ ‘Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject?’ I said ‘No, I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.’ And he went, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’ “And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before:

‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills that make you an interesting person, no matter how well or badly you do them.’ ”

He said that honestly changed his life, because he went from feeling like a failure; someone who was non-skilled, not talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because he enjoyed them. He said he had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of “talent,” that he thought it was only worth doing things if you could “win” at doing them.

To this day I am grateful for his advice and I say to you: Don’t give up on your dreams. I read somewhere that dreams are the souls’ pantry. Keep it well stocked and your soul will never go hungry. Again I ask you: Who are you? My wish for you is that by keeping dreams in your heart and hope in your pocket you will become your authentic self.