one wild and precious life

Talk on the staggering brevity of life and the solemn act of paying attention. Delivered to my senior students of English on the occasion of their final high school class.

Painted skull, 19th century. ‘Jüngling’ means ‘youth.’

i.

Okay, so. Not to be dramatic or anything but here you are in the last hour of the last day of the last year of high school.

The occasion calls for a speech. Is this a speech? Well, what should we call this? An address, maybe? A lecture? A TED talk?

I propose we boil it down to what most acts of communication are at their core: a story.

ii.

[So, what is a story?]

We love stories. We fall in love with stories. We want to marry stories. We love true stories and funny stories. Some of us like scary stories. I’m not one of them, but maybe you are. We like action stories and mystery stories and stories about animals who talk. We love animated stories and sweeping epic stories and stories set in distant words and stories about people who are just like us.

I think one of the reasons we love stories is because we understand them. We get how they work. As English students, we’ve come to understand how a story works. God knows you’ve spent…