The Gift of Perspective

I’d like to suggest that perspective is the one of the most powerful tools you will ever carry, one you already possess, and one that will serve you long after the facts you have memorized fade.

Real perspective is the willingness to see the world as someone else sees it and to hold their reality alongside your own. I am sure many of you recall reading Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about racial injustice and the loss of innocence in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. There is a moment near the beginning of the novel when Atticus Finch turns to his daughter Scout and says something that has stayed with me through time. He tells her: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

That image is almost uncomfortable in its intimacy, but perhaps that discomfort is the point. At the end of the novel, Scout succeeds in understanding Boo Radley’s perspective, fulfilling Atticus’s advice. This ability to understand another’s perspective is what makes the novel linger in our minds long after reading it.

You are entering a world that desperately needs people who can do that.

You have grown up in a time of genuine turbulence: political fracture, environmental anxiety, the disorienting pace of technological change. You have watched democracies strain, watched communities divide, watched a pandemic remake the very texture of daily life. Some of you have carried burdens in these last few years that no young person should have to carry.

You as young people who are entering higher education and myriad of new challenges are, by any historical measure, among the most globally aware, most connected, and perhaps the most empathetic people of all time.

In Beijing and Kharkiv, in Port-au-Prince and London, in Sao Paulo and Basil young people your age are likely asking the same questions you are asking. How do I matter? How do I make something better? How do I find meaning in a complicated world? Those shared questions are an expression of conscience.

Perspective does something remarkable: it also can change what you see when you look at the future.

This spring when the astronauts looked back at Earth from orbit, they quite literally gained a new perspective and described something called the “overview effect.” They had a sudden, overwhelming sense that the borders we draw on maps are invisible from space, but what is real is this one fragile, luminous planet, and the people on it. Astronaut Bob Behnken reflected, "You see that it's a single planet with a shared atmosphere. It's our shared place in this universe." 

You don't need a space craft to feel that. You need curiosity. As well, you need the willingness to read, listen, and sit with someone whose life looks nothing like yours and find the thread that connects you.

That is what an education, at its best, will give you. Not just knowledge but also perspective.

Our great literature carries these truths through the ages. Victorian novelist George Eliot understood how important perspective can be. She was a Victorian woman writing in an era that did not fully see her, so she published her novels under a male pen name just so her ideas could be read. Eliot saw the world with breathtaking clarity and captured the human spirit using psychological insight. At the close of her novel Middlemarch, she writes that the growing good of the world depends not on grand historical gestures, but rather on what she calls "unhistoric acts.” The quiet choices, the small kindnesses, the moments of genuine human decency that no one writes down and history never records, those moments change our world.

In the next four years, you will have more of those moments than you can possibly imagine. A conversation that supports someone. A question asked in a classroom that opens a door. A friendship across difference that changes how two people see the world. None of it will make the news. All of it will matter.

You are not walking into a broken world. You are walking into an unfinished one, and the difference between broken and unfinished is you.

Go learn things that surprise you. Seek out people who see differently than you do. Climb into the world's skin and walk around in it. And when you find yourself doing good in quiet places know that Eliot saw you coming.