Sometimes it seems as though the blinking cursor on the white page of the Microsoft Word document sitting empty before me on my computer screen is taunting me. Like a pompously impatient finger tapping silently and quietly whispering, “Well, well…here we are again. What do you think you can manage to pull out of that little brain of yours and place upon the void that stretches before me today?”

Sometimes, thankfully not too often, the answer is, “I don’t know?” I don’t know what to write? I don’t know what to say? I don’t know what to think? Over the twenty or so years, I have been teaching it has gradually gotten a bit easier for me to say, “I don’t know” to my students without feeling like a complete sham.

None of us can know everything about all things at all times. We are all knuckleheads in a few areas…some more…some less. Yes, Google has the answers, but it takes one of us human types to appropriately apply that answer in a useful way to the particular situational enlightenment and guidance we seek here in the real world. Whatever that is?

Over the past few weeks, and in the few weeks to come in the month of May, many students have and will pass into what is colloquially referred to as the “real world”. The realness of this world that young people are transitioning into today seems a bit harder to objectively identify than the real world us “elders” found ourselves in many moons ago.

I suppose this shaky and shifting ground of realness makes it even more important to have, or attain, the capacity to humbly and authentically embrace not really knowing some things, or at least not really knowing some things for now. Provisional truth…true for now given the best available evidence.

Vigilant skepticism of where, and from whom, that “best available evidence” is paid for, produced, and presented by is of course prudent and wise while traipsing through the real world. Skeptical because you want to know the truth, not because you want to believe. Someone once said, “The truth doesn’t need you to believe it, the truth simply is.”

Maybe the real world is real in different ways for each of us? Maybe there is a common real world that each and every one of us must stumble into at some time or another? Maybe I’m not sure what I’m talking about? Maybe that blinking cursor finally got to me, finally pushed and prodded my fingers to type things the rest of me knows nothing about?

I don’t know? So it goes.

What does the real world need from each of you graduates? I don’t know? Maybe start with kindness and civility and see how this real world gig plays out? If that doesn’t work, try it until it does. What else do you have to do now that you are not being forced to shuffle from room to room at the ring of bell anymore?

As Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The place to change the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

Congratulations graduates, welcome to the real world. You’ll do fine…or you won’t…it’s mostly up to you.