My Speech To Some Old Friends Fom High school

Writer :Peter Gontha
Publisher :Gontha.com
Updated :11.08.2001 00:00

Gontha.com
This was my speech among old friends recently in Jakarta. They Considered me succesfull, They were wrong, I am not, relaitvely speaking I am better off. Many of them were Journalist, Photograhers or low paid employees in big and small corporations. There were 43 of them. Old friends from Canisius College (senior High School) in Jakarta. I was surprised how these guys got together, and said, Why do only the succesfull get together? They invited me, Why me? But yes it was an honour.

Here it goes:


It's a great honor for me to be standing here and tell you, my friends, my experience in Life.

It's an honor to follow my great Uncle who was a gifted diplomat and my Mother who was a remarkable business woman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions about diplomacy or commerce.

I have only a little bit of specialized interest or expertise, which doesn’t put me at a disadvantage talking to you today.

I am an artist, that’s what is in my soul and my heart.

My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.
Don't ever confuse the two------your life and your work.
The second is only part of the first.

I will never forget what Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for re-election because he had been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed 'I wish I had spent more time at the office.'

I will never forget words my father sent me on a postcard in the mid 80's: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has.

There are hundreds of people out there with a degree; there are millions of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a plane, a bus , or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much any more. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume:

I have tried to be good Father of two children.
I have 3 grand Children, Angie, Seravina and Alvaro.

I have tried very hard never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent.
I am probably not succeful in that.

I no longer consider myself the center of the universe.
I show up.
I listen.
I try to laugh.
I continue to try to be a good friend to my wife.

I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say.
I am a good friend to my friends, although they often take me for granted.

Without them however, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut-out.
But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life.

A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, more money, the larger house.

Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a tumor somewhere in your system.

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone.

Find people you love, and who love you.

And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.

Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter.

Get a life in which you are generous.
And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.

I cant say that I take money that I would have spent on Chivas and give it to charity but I try to balance.
Work in a soup kitchen.
Be a big brother or sister.
All of you want to do well.
But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes.

It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.

It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me----- something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all.

I learned to love the journey, not the destination.

I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly.

And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned.

By telling them this:
Consider the lilies of the field.
I look at the fuzz of My Grandchildrens ear.
Read in the backyard with the sun on your face.
Learn to be happy.
And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

I love you all for your friendship, remembering me and most of all inviting me to speak here.

Peter