On May 19, 2012, I delivered the following keynote address at the Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon.

One of the self-indulgent pleasures that comes with delivering a keynote address is the freedom to address nearly any topic. I have decided to take this occasion to remind myself what I could be more attentive to, in my own life. While I believe these confessions will help you in your own future as you graduate from Carnegie Mellon University and enter the Phi Beta Kappa Society — for I wish I had received similar advice when I entered the society 26 years ago — in this lecture format, we will not be conversing one-on-one. As a result, it’s possible that you will find these remarks trivially true, on the one hand; or unhelpfully obscure, on the other. In either case: I beg your patience.

What is “patience”? An old-fashioned word; a woman’s name, like Hope, Prudence, Charity, or Grace; a quality that denotes forbearance. But notice: Patience as a moderating influence runs counter to the cultural practices within our university.

When I describe our university to prospective students — you may remember, once upon a time, you were a prospective student, and before that, a college applicant, uncertain of your prospects, uncertain as you are today about what the coming years will bring, uncertain as anyone who is honest about our inability to predict the future — when I speak to prospective students, I describe Carnegie Mellon as a place with the following characteristics: (1) We work hard. Don’t come here unless you also intend to work hard. We tend to conflate work and pleasure; we look to be passionate about what we do. (2) We work together. We love collaborating on projects and, if you have a good idea, you can find others will rally with you to make it happen. (3) We like to make things. We make tangible results, visible to the world.

This combination of qualities permeate the entire university. Give students at any other college a long weekend away from classes in the spring and you won’t get the marvelous traditions of Carnival, highlighted by Booth and Buggy. With your free time, you work hard to make things, together. In this way, the students, staff, and faculty here are always ON; we have trouble finding an off switch. We are driven by deadlines (assigned and met), by urgency.

In extreme, this type of urgency is the opposite of patiency. Because you have been educated in the pragmatism of urgency, I am here to tell you not to neglect the virtue of patience.

Ahh — you all might say to me if we were in conversation — you are wrong. We understand patience. We have practiced it for years, in the form of deferred gratification. As you just pointed out, we worked long hours to get where we are. And I would agree, my fellow Phi Betes, you certainly possess one type of patience: the ability to deny yourself immediate rewards for the sake of greater future rewards. If you had taken the marshmallow test as a child, I suspect each of you would have received two marshmallows after fifteen minutes, rather than only one marshmallow immediately, a strong indication of self-discipline or metacognition. Furthermore, you have witnessed how the university conducts its own affairs: Bill Dietrich’s gift to the university is an endowment that in turn disburses funds towards the university endowment — a slow but steady compounding of compounded interest, which certainly Ben Franklin and perhaps also Albert Einstein identified as a powerful force.

But these examples of deferring gratification presuppose a greater reward at a later time. What happens if the anticipated reward does not appear? Disappointment. Frustration. Anger. And there are many other forms of patience. In my own life, I need to strengthen the habit. Yesterday I waited for a bus for nearly an hour and found myself grinding my teeth. Last night I yelled at one of my children for striking the other. Grinding teeth and raising voice did not accomplish anything. Patience is a difficult virtue for me to practice.

This spring I’ve been taking scuba lessons, which has proven to be an unexpectedly good venue for practicing patience. Most fundamentally, a scuba diver must always breathe. Never, ever stop breathing, especially while changing depth. Ascend and descend in a controlled fashion. Breathe slowly and deeply, resolve any underwater problems clearly and methodically. As long as you are breathing, we beginning divers are taught, everything is going to be fine. Do not be hasty in your thoughts and you will be able to resolve any difficulties. Do not be rushed in your movements, and you can stay underwater longer. In short: be patient.

This semester, the students in my Meaning Across the Millennia course and I worked on the Earth Tapestry project, to invite all of humanity to help us determine which locations on our planet we should preserve in multiple archives, including on the surface of the Moon, for millions of years. This project, which draws upon time capsules and communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, is another example of patience, on the global level.

I encourage you to practice patience with others, especially when you are frustrated by people you love. I encourage you to practice patience when you find yourself in circumstances beyond your control, such as sitting in a black cap and gown when the sun shines brightly and the temperature soars above 80 degrees — don’t text, don’t surf the web, don’t complain, even to yourself. Keep Calm and Carry On. I encourage you to practice patience, which is a high form of tolerance, with others, listening to other points of view. American political discourse would become more civil if we could become more patient with our fellow citizens.

Most of all, I urge you to be patient with yourself.

Your life is not entirely in your control. It will continue to be filled with wonders and surprises, both joyful and tragic, and events that you will anticipate and dread. This is the adventure of life — we shouldn’t wish it any other way — we would be cursed if every plan we made turned out exactly as we hoped. Don’t dwell on your past successes and disappointments, but rather on the promise of the future. It’s OK (it’s more than OK) to fail. It’s OK (it’s more than OK) to be scared. Keep your expectations high, and pick yourself up again. Be patient with yourself. After all, you’re only human.

In ancient Greek thought, the soul and the breath were the same: psuche, from which we derive the words psyche and psychology. You cannot always be inspired – in fact, in order to be creative, you should admit a rhythm of intense focus, then relaxation. The process is like scuba: you cannot always be breathing in, always inspired.

I therefore encourage you to balance both urgency and patiency in your life. The message of urgency is: Live each day as though it were your last. Seize opportunities as they present themselves. The message of patiency is: Live each day as though it were your first. Life is long — although I wouldn’t recommend waiting a quarter century if you’re interested in becoming a scuba diver, because it’s a lot of fun.

In closing, as you commence the rest of your life this weekend, I encourage you to make patience a regular practice and — to be reflexive about it — be patient with yourself about becoming more patient.

Thank you for your forbearance this morning.

Yesterday we held an event for new faculty in the Mellon College of Science. Here is roughly what I said:

In the spirit of Nikki Giovanni, the poet who spoke here on campus Monday, I want to share a story about one of my experiences as a young scientist. I’ve hardly ever told this before.

When I was an undergrad at Cornell, I loved being a scientist: my senior advisor taking us to Souvlaki House for pizza every Saturday, working in the lab, exploring the library stacks, just wandering the corridors and seeing what everyone was doing.

When I moved to Berkeley for graduate school in chemistry, my experience was quite different. Everything felt tight, starting with the rush to pick a research group and advisor in the first six weeks.

One afternoon I wandered the top floor of Latimer, peeking through windows, reading research posters. Someone, a junior professor at the time, rushed down the hall and confronted me: What are you doing? I want to see what kind of research is happening on this floor, I replied. Are you a student? Yes, I’m a new grad student. All right then, who is your research advisor? Birgit Whaley, I told him. There have been a lot of thefts around here: show me your ID. At this point I was nervous, trembling as I fumbled in my pocket, and finally produced the document. He gave it a very hard look, tossed it back at me, spun around on his heels, and left me alone, speechless. The message was quite clear: someone who looks like you doesn’t belong here.

I’m not telling this story merely to say that the Berkeley Chemistry Department was always a bad place for me in the mid 1980s and early 1990s – although it often was.

I’m telling this story because we professors, here at Carnegie Mellon in the year 2018, have to remember that we have an enormous impact on our students, our advisees, among ourselves and within the entire scientific community. We need to remind ourselves how much our words and actions affect others.

None of us is innocent. We have, all of us, committed wrong as well as been wronged throughout our lives in different ways, sometimes thoughtlessly: we all have implicit biases, somtimes most strongly and strangely against members of our own gender or ethnicity.

As the Assistant Dean for Diversity, I believe the best solution is to throw open the windows, be willing to be vulnerable and share a bit more about each other, to listen and to learn from others.

And then I described some of the resources and opportunities available to them in the areas of diversity and inclusion.

As chapter president for the Carnegie Mellon chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, since Fall 2012 I have delivered the charge to new initiates. Here are my remarks from today, in which I “speak briefly on the ideals of the Society and the responsibilities of membership”.

Phi Beta Kappa is an American institution. This afternoon I would like to talk about what that means for you as a new member of our society – not because I necessarily embrace American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a particular destiny to fulfill that renders us superior to other nations, but rather because I do believe that America is exceptional, and that history can be instructive.

Imagine an era when the United States is suffering through uneasy times. Imagine, if you can, a time when the country is at war, with enormous costs borne by human lives and by circumstances that indebt us deeply to another overseas nation. Imagine a time when per capita income, after years of steady growth, is plummeting; when Americans are driven from their homes; when the very underpinnings of the American monetary system depend upon the financial system of another country. Not surprisingly, during this time, the citizenry is divided about what course of action to take, holding fundamentally different political assumptions about what should become of the United States, and about what the proper rights and responsibilities of individuals, states, and the nation should be with respect to each other, including profound divisions on issues such as fair taxation and involvement in foreign affairs.

These are the sorts of troubles that afflicted the loose affiliation of the states united in 1776, when our society Phi Beta Kappa was founded, and if we somehow should ever find ourselves again in a similar, dire time as a nation or as individuals, we can look back to that history and draw some lessons.

They were human beings, which is to say they were both like and unlike us, those young men at the College of William & Mary who started our society. Muddling through their lives, they sought to form a society that represented some of their highest ideals. It takes a certain serious playfulness to form such a club, which is now the oldest academic honor society. Those young men, whose bones are now everywhere dust, created something that still endures today, by virtue of their focus on a spirit of companionship, zest for life, and quest for knowledge.

These qualities are captured by the motto for the society, which I believe is a retronym constructed from the letters Phi Beta Kappa. That motto is Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης — generally translated as “The love of learning is the guide of life.” But when I see those words, I also see the academic disciplines Philosophy, Biology, and Cybernetics. Philosophy we recognize here at Carnegie Mellon as a department in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Biological Sciences in the Mellon College of Science, but Cybernetics as an interdisciplinary study is less well-known these days. The name of that discipline was coined by Norbert Wiener and, while it connects many fields, one might say that it belongs to the School of Computer Science. So the motto for our society, Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης, embraces three departments within those colleges at Carnegie Mellon from which we generally seek initiates into the society.

Now – as during its formation – the Phi Beta Kappa society is connected to but also distinct from your formal academic studies. So no matter which of the colleges is your home, this society now belongs equally to every one of you.

Having just presented a Carnegie Mellon (Upsilon of Pennsylvania)-centered account of how the Phi Beta Kappa motto relates to our own university, and having heard earlier from our historian about the society’s symbols, I will now present a more personal interpretation of the key that symbolizes our society. The three main design elements on the obverse face are the pointing hand, three Greek letters, and three clustered stars. The earthbound hand on the key is pointing towards something, but what? Most directly, it’s pointing towards the letter Beta. But if you follow the trajectory of the gesture, it is pointing towards the stars, as though to visually indicate, through means of the society Phi Beta Kappa, you can reach the stars.

That constellation of stars indicates something simultaneously unreachable yet visible, something accessible to human thought and analysis, which suggests a quest for knowledge. Moreover, the fact that we see a constellation or asterism, a group of stars, suggests that the hand is pointing towards a union, a society. And I would go even further. I suggest that the hand is actually not pointing to the stars themselves, but is pointing between the stars, that is, beyond the stars. If you follow the gesture closely, you may also see: the hand is pointing towards some essence that is even beyond the visible, yet we might somehow be guided towards its direction by following the path of fellowship and by searching for knowledge.

We are poised at this moment between the past and the future. We are also at the border between the dust and the heavens. We approach our finest possibility by navigating through life // with the love of the search for knowledge as our guide. This guide, the love of the search for knowledge, conducted in fellowship, will help us to navigate that fine strait between humiliation and hubris – to become more fully human.

Phi Beta Kappa was originally intended as a haven for free discussion of timely issues and timeless ideas, during an era of revolution and social upheaval. Let us carry forth the example of the initial members of the society, and ourselves serve for future years and generations – to attend to, reflect upon, discuss, and take action on issues and ideas. Let us conduct ourselves so that we may improve ourselves as well as the greater societies of family, friendship, city, nation, and world. Let us display our love for wisdom as a guide for life.

In closing, remember: there may come a time when you as individuals, or the children who one day may smile with you, or your neighbors and their children … will live during a time of war, economic hardship, political friction, and personal hardship. If you should ever find your nation and yourself in that situation, extend your hands in a reach for higher knowledge, shake hands with others in fellowship, and use your hands to build for our broader society. I wish for all of you the best in these times and those to come.