Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
(Audience laugh...)
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
J.K. Rowling, 2008 Commencement Speech at Harvard
I started to "swim" properly at age of 1, or maybe even earlier, if playing in water can be counted as swimming. There is always a solid place shallow enough to stand on in a bathtub or a swimming pool. However, the situation changed when I am not allowed in the children's pool anymore. So I decided to swim, really, but I have to learn it first.
I asked family members how they learned to swim. They said, back in the old days, they had a pond besides their home, and they played in the pond, dived in the pond, and then they just started to swim. It seems to me another story of the family's tradition of despising formal education, but they also suggested that I can learn it without being taught. Since studies have shown that babies can swim right after being born, I said to myself, swimming should be my natural ability, and I just need to find it back. So I listed being able to swim as one of my goals of that year.
So I spent most of my Friday afternoons in a swimming pool during my exchange days in Singapore, observing, swimming, and, occasionally, getting half-drowned. I realized that getting the "natural ability" back isn't something easy. But fortunately, it wasn't too hard either. After a few months, I was able to swim back and forth in a lane, breaststroke of course. After another few months, free-style. A very achievable goal for a year, I thought.
Yesterday, I went to swim again with my labmates, and one of us started to try free-style. Seeing her swimming in free-style reminded me almost instantaneously of myself three years ago, and a quote:
That which you persist in doing becomes easier to do. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed, but that your ability to do it has increased.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ikoka/2763601145/
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