It is graduation season, and social media is flooded with commencement speeches. Taylor Swift, Ronnie Chieng, Ken Frazier, Hilary Duff. Ronnie Chieng won funniest, dropping F bombs about AI in front of a bunch of Harvard nerds.
But the one that touched me most came from a 17-year-old high school kid whose name I had never heard.
He said we all get asked the same question: what do you want to be ten years from now? And instead of giving the expected answer, he looked backward. The moment he remembered most from ten years ago was not an award ceremony (which is surprising for an Asian kid). Not a milestone. It was a bunch of monkeys on a playground, attacking a 7 year old version of himself, tickling him. Not a pleasant memory. Not one he chose to keep. But it stuck.
He asked: why that moment? Why does the mind hold on to that and let everything else go? And he said: I don’t know. The mind works in stupid and mysterious ways. But maybe that is the point. Not every moment needs an explanation. Not every memory needs to make sense.
I thought: this is the least motivational speech I have ever seen. How did this kid get valedictorian? But then he said it.
“The moments that define us are not the ones we plan for. They are the ones we remember. You cannot remember a life you are too busy planning to live.”
WOW.
I have been answering “where do you see yourself ten years from now” probably since I was 6. Kid-to-adult conversations, adult-to-adult conversations, college interviews, graduate school interviews, job interviews, every single year. One version involved becoming an investment banker, a finance female leader changing the male-dominated finance world, making investing approachable to every person in every corner of the world. I answered that one with complete confidence. Now looking back I laugh my ass off. Did doing 100 versions of DCF models change the world? Err. I have not delivered on a single version, not once, in 30 plus years.
Those answers had absolutely nothing to do with who I am.
My “monkey moments” were also never planned.
The night I fell asleep on I-78 and crashed my car at 2am after a typical 9am to 2am consultant day, a stranger pulled me out, called the police, and stayed with me while I stood in complete shock on the shoulder of the highway. Because of that crash I ended up subleasing a room from a single Chinese mother in central New Jersey, who shared a studio with her only son, a shower curtain the only thing separating their two beds. After I was laid off from a non-consultant job in Boston, for over six months I hopped from one extended stay hotel to another, not knowing where my next job would be. During one of those winters in New England, a woman I knew only as the cat lady found me standing barefoot in pajama pants outside during a midnight fire alarm and told me to just get in her car. I got in. Later that same season, at the Burlington extended stay, on my birthday, people on the first floor started screaming. I was frozen and thought I was going to die on my birthday and never see my son again. A man I did not know grabbed my arm, pushed me toward a side exit, and got me out. Two men killed a woman on that floor that day. My room was on the same wing.
None of those people had names I held onto. None of those moments were in any plan. They were not important by any standard I was taught to use. I cannot even put them into a structured, motivational speech. But I swear they are the ones I will remember until I die (unless I get dementia before I die).
Near my 40th birthday, we had planned a trip to Europe. Every tenth birthday is a big deal in Chinese culture.
One month before, we found a lost baby blue jay in our backyard. He was wandering, clearly not being fed. We googled and called wildlife protection. They told us to leave him alone and he would be fine. He was obviously not fine. So we looked up what fledgling blue jays need, learned it was insects and high protein, and every evening the three of us went out with a zapper and a cookie tin to the community field. We walked through the high grass, zapped bugs, carried them home in the tin. Sometimes the insects woke back up and started running across the floor. My husband, who had never been a pet person, who was always against having pets, would pick up a pair of tweezers and remove their legs so the little jay could eat.
We kept this up for three weeks. The jay still could not fly. We agreed without much discussion to cancel the Europe trip. The one who surprised me most was my son. He was the first one to say we should stay. He did not complain about the canceled trip, not even asking whether we would reschedule it. He just said we should stay.
So we celebrated my 40th birthday at home with a blue jay.
When he finally left we missed him so much that we got a dog. We named him JJ. Jay Jay.
I did not plan any of that. I think about it far more often than I think about any well-rehearsed version of any 5-year plan I ever gave.
There are so many moments like this. Random. Unplanned. Too ordinary for a speech or even a journal entry. But those are the ones that tell us who we are. Those are the ones that stay.
They also tell you it is OK not to have a perfect plan, a perfectly ambitious answer to “where I want to be”, a glorious, inspiring portrait that fits everyone else’s narrative about what a life should look like. We will all be fine. Our kid will be fine.
Like the kiddo said: you cannot remember a life you are too busy planning to live.
Life only happens in the moment, in the unexpected one where you spot a baby bird, or stand frozen in a cold New England night, or someone grabs your arm in the dark and moves you forward. Be present. Be there.
(Except the extended stay hotel shooting. Do not be present for that one.)
Thank you, kiddo.
Stranger in a Strange Land 