We want to be inspired. We want to learn something. We want to cry. We want to laugh.
We want to be prompted to think deeply. We want to have our minds opened. Oh, and we want to be shown a path to lifting all of humanity. Yes, these expectations of a successful speech are a hefty burden on a commencement speaker, or any kind of event keynoter. But it seems those addressing almost-graduates have an especially big task — rising to this milestone occasion by delivering a resonant, relevant and memorable address.
Sometimes, though, it’s the speeches leading up to the big one which shine brightest.
That was the case at commencement exercises I attended recently at Georgetown University. Henry Winkler was the main draw but no offense to The Fonz, it was the Class of 2025 student speaker Noa Offman who stole the show two days earlier at the university’s Convocation gathering.
Noa began by citing the lesson she’d learned amongst the provincial parks of Ontario, Canada, where she canoeed and camped in the summer. “Always leave your campsite better than you found it,” she was taught, recalling scanning the land from the water as she paddled away to ensure she had done so. What she called this “small act of care” shaped Noa’s “understanding of what we owe the places we pass through.”
That phrase “what we owe the places we pass through” caught my attention, and my heart, because while Noa was using the reference to emphasize the transition from college, she was also talking about something bigger. Something maybe we’ve forgotten in these fraught times. How would our communities, our country, be different if we approached each other and “the places we pass through” with this same understanding of the impact of small acts of care?
Noa then related a life-changing experience she had as a freshman taking a require theology course. Her professor had arranged a Zoom call with an inmate in a D.C. jail, Colie “Shaka” Long, 45, who was serving life in prison for a murder committed when he was 18. Like most of us, Noa had never had a conversation with an incarcerated person, and her perspective going into the conversation was what most people’s would be — we are being protected from “bad guys” like Long, and his sentence meant ”justice prevails.”
Yet she said, “Shaka was a living contradiction. He exuded kindness and dedicated his life to mentoring young people.” Meeting him, Noa continued, “shook me to my core” because he embodied her “campsite principle in its fullest for he had found a way to enrich even the most inhumane of spaces.”
The experience prompted Noa to change her major and set herself on a course to be a prisoners’ rights lawyer and advocate.
You don’t have to share her passion or point of view on justice to be inspired by Noa’s transformation. Actually, it’s her willingness to be transformed which inspires, because it’s so rare.
Even young people, maybe especially young people, on college campuses and in our communities seem so set in their points of view. They, like many adults, live in their own echo chambers, seeking out confirmatory rather than contradictory information. Noa made me question my own supposed “open mind.” When was the last time I reached out and listened, really listened, to someone with a completely different view on something I cared about? When have you?
Noa concluded her speech with an exhortation to her classmates to live a life of purpose, “with a commitment to something beyond ourselves.”
“May we be known,” she said, “not just for what we achieve, but for what we improve. May we resist the seduction of comfortable apathy. May we leave each space we enter — wherever that might be — measurably better for our having been there.”
Noa said she learned these lessons from a man behind prison walls. I feel newly committed to these lessons because of her.
What a speech. What light Noa will bring to the places she passes through. And with her campsite principle in mind, so may us all.
Virginia Buckingham
Virginia Buckingham is a former president of the Marblehead Current board of directors, a frequent commentator on WCVB’s On the Record and author of “On My Watch A Memoir.” She is working on a second memoir, “As This Mountain” in her newly empty nest and writes a biweekly column for the Current.
