Affirmation

Convocation Commencement Speech

By Robby Bensinger, Bloomington Center Student

The key to a successful life is being able to see the unseeable and say the unsayable. In other words, you must be able to figure out what others are thinking and feeling based on their actions, and you must be able to communicate your own thoughts and feelings so that others can understand you.

But nobody can truly see into another's mind: the thoughts and memories which give our lives context and continuity are isolated from everyone else's; our personal streams of consciousness never intermingle or unite in some sprawling ocean of the mind. Likewise, we can never perfectly convey what is in our own mind to anyone else; we can never really be fully understood by another. We are forever alone in our own skulls.

Asperger's and other conditions may further impede our abilities in these areas, but all humans share the same basic problem of being unable to read one anothers' minds. We are forced to infer and guess at entire universes of inner life. We are forced to continually explain to others what seems painfully obvious within our own heads.

While we develop the ability to articulate our own thoughts at an early age, even more crucial to growing up is the recognition that there are other "I"s behind others' eyes. Yet some of the most serious problems we face stem from our failure to remember that simple fact: we get caught up in ourselves and forget that everyone else is a thinking, feeling "self" too. We forget that every stranger is a friend or loved one to someone else, that even people we've never met deserve our empathy and compassion.

Because we only ever hear our own inner monologues, we forget that everyone else has a monologue too, they have hopes and dreams and fears and regrets and even a sense of humor. No matter how different we seem on the surface, on the inside we're all just ourselves. Nothing more.

Most conflict is a result of this failure of ours to communicate with and understand one another. And really, it isn't possible for us to ever fully understand or be understood by others. At best we can only attain some faint pantomime of mutual understanding. Yet society depends on our continuous string of failed attempts to figure out what others are thinking. All art, all language, all culture is a product of our flawed efforts to communicate the unique contents and contours of our minds to others.

And our failure to do so perfectly or completely is not shameful, but praiseworthy: it is in striving for unattainable perfection that we create life's beauty and variety. It is this universal human imperfection that defines both our limitations and our aspirations. In learning and developing the skills this program focuses on, we have made huge strides in our ability to express our thoughts and interpret others'.

And as we continue to develop these skills throughout our lives, we will continue to experience moments of great frustration along with moments of great interconnectedness. But through each setback and each triumph, what matters is that we will always know that other people are just other selves. And both in CIP and in life we'll always have new things to learn and new things to share with this world of selves. And we are not alone after all.

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