Keziah provides symmetrical perspectives for graduates

Sanford "Sandy" Keziah

Sanford "Sandy" Keziah, who founded Boulder's Kindred Keziah with his wife, Victoria Kindred, delivered the School's fall commencement address on Dec. 15. They sold their marketing and brand strategy firm, now named Egg Strategy, in March.

There are so few significant life markers that are of the same order of magnitude as a college graduation. I certainly feel honored that you've invited me to participate in this day of ending and of beginning as you put a cap on your formal youth and you commence your official adulthood.

I'm reminded of the statement that Winston Churchill made in 1942: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Which is exactly why I'm so delighted to be with you today and to have the opportunity to address you at this rare moment in time – at this major marker at the end of your beginning.

I've had plenty of opportunities to address audiences. But what is so distinctive about this opportunity vs. others is not only the fact that you folks are at a moment of transition and are not yet embedded in a context, but also that I'm free to explore virtually any subject matter. As far as I can tell, unless you folks forgot to send me the guidelines for my talk, I've got carte blanche to discuss anything I want.

And I've got to tell you, my reaction to this contextless carte blanche has been absolutely chaotic. First I was wildly excited by the sheer freedom – this literal freedom of speech I was offered. Next, I had a terrifying thought:  What if I freeze in front of all this white space?  What if this carte blanche leaves me tabula rasa?

But that fear was quickly overwhelmed by an onslaught of things I just had to tell you. About first jobs and last chances, about delayed gratification vs. carpe diem, about the imperatives of hard work and the indispensability of luck, about the hundreds of other life lessons, large and small, you'll learn over the next years and decades that I'd love to short-circuit for you in my freedom of a speech. I wanted to give you that commencement speech that went around the Internet several years back about how you should wear sunscreen and floss and take care of your knees and respect your elders.

But covering hundreds of life lessons was like drinking from a fire hose. And the sunscreen speech had already been written.

So what I was left with was just one little piece of symmetry. Actually, one little piece of symmetrical relevance. You see, it's been 21 years since I was 21 and sitting in your seat; 21 years since I was a 21-year-old graduating from college like you; 21 years since I, like you are today, was at the end of my beginning. And what makes this little piece of symmetry relevant is that today, 21 years after my 21st year, I, like you, am once again at the end of my beginning.

I'm at the end of a decade-long era as CEO of a leading brand strategy firm, having sold it in March. I'm at the end of my almost two-decade-long communications career as I find myself open to new opportunities and areas of growth. And I'm most likely at the end of my first half of life, knowing that I can't really expect more than 84 good years.

So the opportunity of this speech is not to tell you how to walk your path, because your path undoubtedly will be filled with your own personal pinnacles and pitfalls that I could never anticipate. Rather, the opportunity is to join with you as one who is also ending my beginning and who is also preparing to commence my next era, to share with you really the one major idea that is surfacing for me during our symmetrically aligned moments of ending and beginning.

And the one major idea that is surfacing for me right now is this:  If you search for your golden thread of character, with it you will weave the life you are meant to live.

Twenty-one years ago, following my graduation, I returned to the Jersey Shore to once again take up work on hotels and restaurants. But as summer turned into fall, I became increasingly disillusioned with what I was doing.

My pragmatic self was satisfied with business and with how I was fulfilling all my career expectations. But my impractical self, that bratty side of me that yearned for art, intellect and freedom, was feeling malnourished and was screaming for attention. I really didn't know what to do or how I could move on at that point in my career. What would my partner and best friend, the B of B & K Associates, feel if I left?  What precisely should I do?  I felt a bit trapped in the opportunity I'd created and I didn't know how to get out, so I just coasted.

I'm sure all of you have found yourselves in similar situations,  situations that may have met all of the appropriate criteria. They met your family's mores and expectations. They fulfilled the unspoken societal mandates. They were responsible and seemed like what you should be doing. But for some reason, they just couldn't fully contain you.

By the time the holiday season of that year rolled around, there was a big part of me that was not contained in my life, but I continued to roll with the tide.

As I was sitting on the beach in Boca Raton, Fla., one day, I picked up a novel I had brought along called "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy. I had never read any Percy, but I was familiar with him because he was mentioned several times in a seminar on Kierkegaard I'd taken during my senior year at Duke.

Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when I opened that book, because right there on the very first page Percy had a quote by Kierkegaard that said, "… the specific character of despair is precisely this:  it is unaware of being despair." 

That quote literally took my breath away. On that beautiful 80-degree, sunshiny day on the Boca Raton beach, Kierkegaard reached out to me from the 19th century, grabbed me by the collar and said, "Sandy, you're in despair."  There it was. It was the unavoidable personal conclusion that I could not escape. I was in despair because I knew I wasn't on my path, I knew I wasn't living a life I felt compelled to live, but I was avoiding the issue. I was stuck in stasis, not knowing what to do about it.

Luckily for me, Percy had seemingly anticipated my reading of his book, because on page 13 I came across a passage that said this:  "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

That was it. That was the deep human truth that I somehow knew, but in my everyday despair I didn't consciously know that I knew it. This notion of "being on the search" was the one thought that in many ways started and drove my last 21 years.

Because what Percy and Kierkegaard were saying to me 21 years ago at the age of 21, and what they are trying to say to you today, at or about the age of 21, is that most people live their lives in despair. Not clinical depression despair, but the despair of comfortably going along with the circumstances and expectations of their lives. Of doing what our families, our friends, our bosses, our colleagues, our culture, our careers, our religion or even our own expectations expect of us. The despair of doing what we think it takes to succeed in the outward world but failing to truly know our deepest self, with its desires and yearnings, its contradictions and irreconcilable conflicts.

So on that beach 21 years ago I decided to take up the search rather than to continue on in despair. And in so doing, I took full possession of that golden thread of character that began to define my life by holding me accountable to a personal belief system and set of values as it wove itself through my life, decision by decision, era to era.

The decision to take up the search was essentially the decision that all of me was valid and fair game, the happy and the sad, the rational and the irrational, the pragmatist and the pariah, the cohesive and the incongruous. It was the decision to acknowledge myself as a multidimensional and complex character whose golden thread could only be woven by searching out and incorporating those sides of my self that didn't fit into the expected channels of adult behavior and responsibility. It was the embracing of Walt Whitman's sentiment in "Song of Myself" when he said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

The very first thing I did upon returning home was to apply to study theology at Harvard. From the vantage point of 21 years hence, this may not seem like such a radical move, especially given that things seem to have turned out all right.

But at the time, my decision was an affront to most of the important people in my life:  to my business partner whom I was abandoning, to my agnostic father who thought I was wasting my life by studying theology rather than staying with business, to my fervently evangelical mother who felt that studying theology at liberal Harvard was tantamount to dining with the devil, to even my own internal sense of pragmatism, as I would carry three jobs throughout my years there and graduate with debts but no clearer career path than when I started.

Out of the hundreds of possible choices available to me, choosing to study theology at that moment in my life was perhaps the least sensible thing I could do. It didn't make sense to the agnostics or the evangelicals, to my partner or my own pragmatism.

Looking back over the last 21 years, from Madison Avenue to the mountains of Colorado, I am struck by how many of my major decisions resulted from letting my illogical, intuitive, sometimes rebellious but always highly personal side have a voice, even when it didn't make sense.

If I hadn't listened to this voice, I would have never given up my business path to study the deep human truths embedded in theology. I would have never terminated my flourishing career in New York to load up a Budget truck and move out to the Boulder boonies. I would have never opened up a firm that only offered ephemeral brand strategy when all the communications leaders in New York told me that you had to provide a tangible deliverable like advertising or PR to generate client billings.

And now, from this vantage point, what's most delightful is the ironic realization that in rejecting the comfortable stasis of Kierkegaardian despair and embracing the kinetic dynamism of the Percian search for authenticity, I sent myself down an entirely nonsensical, irrational path that began with theology but proved to be much more valuable to a business career than an MBA would have ever been for me. I could have never known at the time, but Coca-Cola, Lever Brothers, Bacardi, IBM, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, Dom Perignon and many others were hungry for the type of deep human truths that only a divinity-school-founded brand consulting firm could bring to them.

Today, on this rare marker of a day, this culturally given pause, I hope that you, too, will join with me to contemplate your own search and to commit to weaving your own golden thread of character that will define your adult life.

Because you, too, "contain multitudes," as Whitman said. You, too, are complex. And you are about to enter a much more complex world than you have known before. Yet, ironically, this world will seek from you reductionist attitudes and normative behavior. It will ask that you abandon your ongoing search for deep human truth and personal authenticity. Instead, it will want you to default to the comfortable acceptance of one-dimensional expectations. It will expect for you to be unaware of your own despair.

Today, most of you are pretty well teed up for careers in the communications space. You'll graduate having studied journalism, advertising, broadcast and media, all career tracks that set you up to speak broadly to our nation and beyond, to influence culture, to hold the rest of us accountable, perhaps even to be voices or forces of truth and justice in our media.

You will, no doubt, go through years of dues-paying in which you are less than fully in control of all that you are working on. You will find that events come and go, decisions happening much more quickly than you can think, and trade-offs are made. And your thread of character will be not only the only guiding force you will have during those times, but ultimately it will become a product of those times as well.

As you sit here today ending your beginning and commencing your adulthood, I hope you'll think about what your thread of character is made of.

 Is it made up of pragmatic concerns, or is it broad enough to include the impractical and eccentric as well?  Is it defined by career and success, or does it also value the complexity of your humanity and the multiplicity of your many truths? 

There is no way that your path will be anything like mine. There is no way that I, or even you, can anticipate all that will occur over the next 21 years of your life. No one can tell you what your golden thread of character could be or should be.

But I can tell you this:  You and I have a delightful little symmetry between us. We both sit in this transitional space between who we have been and who we will become.

And we both have this wonderful opportunity to engage in our own personal search to assess what kind of character we are creating for the next 21 years.   Will we create a thread of character that is one-dimensional and common like base metal or a thread that has luster, complexity, rarity and dimension like precious gold?

To paraphrase the high-brow thoughts of 20th century theologian Paul Tillich, I hope you make of yourself what you are supposed to become to fulfill your destiny.

Or maybe I should just offer you the distinctly lower-brow advice given to me 21 years ago at my own graduation by the Rev. William Sloan Coffin: "And remember, even if you win the race, you're still a rat."

Class of 2005, I hope that you will become aware of the possibility of your own search so that as you begin your next phase, you are onto something. And that by searching beyond the expected, you will create for yourself a golden thread of character with which you will weave the life you are meant to live.

Thank you and congratulations.