Distinguished
guests, faculty and UNH graduates ~ it is a distinct honor to be standing on
this blue and white decorated podium today and deliver the commencement address
to the class of 2012.
55
years ago I was one of you and perhaps feeling the same excitement and
jubilation that many of you are feeling today ~ but there was another feeling I
felt that day; it was a profound twinge of awareness that there was nothing
I could not accomplish if I set my mind and heart to it.
Two
years prior to my graduation, at the end of my sophomore year, I came to the
sad realization that my hotel management major was totally wrong for me, I was
not the least bit interested in managing my step father’s hotel in Miami Beach
and had neglected my true interest in English Literature and the Arts.
I
had spent most of those first two years having a great time partying with my
friends, hosting a nightly campus jazz radio show ( The Rock Roland Show
) and dating as many beautiful girls as possible. I vividly remember driving my
black hearse (with my name on the side) on to this very same playing
field during half time of a football game with people hanging all over it and a
keg of brew sitting on its roof ~ I was something else!
I
didn’t pledge a fraternity during those two years and had a small single room
in one of the dormitories ~ I would describe myself as fairly self centered,
emotionally immature and somewhat lost.
However,
once I gave up making a career choice to please my step father and switched my
major to my real love, English Literature and the Arts ~ my world changed.
My friends changed also as I excitedly plunged
into a new curriculum heavy with Arts and English Lit courses. I had a lot of
wasted time to make up for and I was taking a heavy class load to accumulate
the units I needed to graduate. So I began to write, I began to paint; I began
to sing; I took piano jazz chord structure lessons so I could develop a piano
style that was uniquely my own. My inspiration was Errol Garner, a self taught
genius whose childhood exuberance and joy was expressed in all of his music and
particularly his own composition ~ Misty. 4
minute Video:
So
I played like Errol with his lagging base line, diminished chords and crashing
discord endings and adapted that to my own arrangements. I was still having
fun but was now beginning to share my gifts with others. My best friend was
Shawn Malloy and Shawn convinced me to pledge his fraternity Phi Mu Delta in my
junior year. I’m still grateful to Shawn for pushing me in that direction ~
because I emotionally needed that caring group of brothers and they
enthusiastically accepted and supported my music, energy and projects. They,
along with the house mother, became the supportive family I never truly enjoyed
as a young child. Phi Mu Delta was easily the most attractive building on
Fraternity Row and, at that time, had the reputation of housing the campus
gifted or perhaps strange ones ~ not so much athletically gifted but
intellectually and creatively gifted. I had found my home.
For
example, my senior art project was a series of paintings of a famous rock on
the shore of Nahant, Massachusetts ~ Castle Rock. I created three
huge paintings ~ one was realistic, another was semi-abstract and the third was
totally abstract but all were a different medium and all had to capture the
essence of that rock.
My
fraternity brothers, who I entertained almost every night with my house musical
trio, suggested I use the huge basement wall to create the abstract fresco of
that rock ~ which I did much to their delight and at times amusement and
eventually to the astonished pleasure of my senior project acceptance
committee.
The
only teacher I vividly remember from my time at UNH also became an inspiration. He was a substitute teacher who was teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare
was like music to me and he lived Shakespeare as well as all the great poets.
I
vividly remember to this day watching him lean out of the classroom
building window while quoting Shakespeare ~ “ If music be the food of love, play
on; Give me excess of it, that
surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more;
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,”
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more;
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,”
The
gift he gave me and the class was the gift of him living his dream and sharing
and celebrating that gift from a place of deep joy and delight. He was my
greatest teacher because he fully gave the gift of himself ~ and became an
inspiration for me to do exactly the same thing in my on going work with
others, both as a psychotherapist and writer.
I
was a voracious reader at UNH and devoured Steinbeck, F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Hemingway but as a child I also loved Jack London and this London quote could eventually be
my epitaph ~ “I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper
function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying
to prolong them ~ I shall use my time”
As
I began to grow in self acceptance and discover and share my artistic gifts ~
my tough and armored Rock Roland shell began to disintegrate and I gradually
became the Allen L Roland I am today ~ but it wasn’t a painless process.
It
was here at UNH that I also fell in love and was emotionally shattered when the
object of my affection returned to a former love and I was left weeping in my
Fraternity House mother’s arms. Thank God I allowed myself to feel that deeply because, in
so doing, I tapped into a far deeper level of feeling and creativity that
profoundly manifested itself eventually in my writing and poetry.
I
did not graduate with honors ~ far from it, for I barely accumulated enough
units to be standing on the stage where you will soon be receiving your diploma.
But
I did graduate with the acute awareness that I was prepared to live my dreams,
whatever they were, and fear and self doubt would not stop me.
I
believe it was W.H. Murray who wrote ~ “I have learned a deep respect for
one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
I graduated
into a troubled world in 1957, the Vietnam
conflict was just over the horizon and the draft was facing me. With my college
degree, I embarked on another dream ~ to become a Navy carrier pilot. I signed
a five year service extension and entered the Navy Aviation Officer Candidate
program and within two years was assigned to the West Coast and was flying F3H
supersonic Jets on the USS Ranger off the coast of Japan and China ~ I was
once again living my dream.
Eventually I found the courage to fully open my
heart and live my deepest dream ~ to re-discover
the truth of a joyful state of love and soul consciousness,
that I once knew as a child, and utilize it in my everyday work as a
psychotherapist especially with Veterans with PTSD. I have not found great
wealth in finding this field of psychic energy and consciousness, that exists
beyond time and space as well as beneath our deepest
fears ( a Unified Field that physicists, scientists and dreamers
have and are still searching for ) but I have found immense satisfaction in
proving its existence to myself and countless others.
I prove its
validity every day in my work and if you Google “ The Unified Field “ ~ as I
see many of you are now doing ( chuckle ) ~ you will see my Unified
Field perched in the #1 position, after
Wikipedia’s definition of the Unified Field Theory, with well over 1 million
results.
In other
words, dear soon to be fellow graduates of UNH ~ I’m making a difference and
that’s all I’ve essentially ever wanted to do on this brief journey to planet
Earth.
The words
of William James would seem to sum
up my feelings as I enter the last chapter of my life ~ while you
coincidentally are just finishing the first chapter of yours; “ I am done with great things and big things and
great institutions and big successes, and I am for those tiny invisible moral
forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies
of the world like so many rootlets or like the capillary oozing water, yet
which, if you give them time, will bend the hardest monuments of human pride.”
In other
words, dear graduates ~ It’s not about making money, It’s all about making a
difference.
Thank you,
Allen L
Roland
http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/to-unh-class-of-2012.html
Allen L Roland is a practicing
psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and
social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest
hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist
and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also
available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and
private consultations (allen@allenroland.com)
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