Year of Breaking, Year of Breathing: Graduation 2020 Keynote Address

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By Kevin Hong

It is wonderful to be among so many familiar faces, and humbling to be asked to share some thoughts with you today. Let me say first, dear graduates, how proud I am of all of you for reaching this milestone in your lives, and how full of admiration I am for all of you, students, parents, family and friends, faculty and staff, for finding ways to persevere and to be in community despite the ongoing pandemic.

Beginning around March, Coronavirus severely restricted our sphere of activity. The excitement of life as we knew it ceased. What we could do each day became mostly confined to what we could do within the walls of our own homes. Our movements were honed to the bare essentials—commute to an essential job or stay home and log onto Zoom, eat a can of beans with a questionable expiration date that you found in the back of a cabinet, watch too many episodes of “Queer Eye,” sleep. “What day is it?” became the running joke as the government failed to respond and the virus’s timeline lengthened. Time’s arrow bent into a loop.

To me, paradoxically, in the midst of an extraordinary crisis, the ordinariness of life, its everyday banality, suddenly loomed larger, as if every lived hour now passed under a magnifying glass. A range of daily phenomena that I had previously taken for granted now took center stage as the very stuff of life. I wonder if you feel, as I do, how strange it is that in a time when the word “normal” seems to have lost its meaning, the rhythm of repetition has asserted its dominance each day. I am reminded of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, in which a weatherman named Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, is forced to endlessly relive the same dull day in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I love that premise—a man whose job it is to predict the future is compelled to repeat the present, to wonder when tomorrow will come.

I wonder how you have responded to this unique condition—a sense of sameness amidst a historical rupture. I can only speak to my own experience, in which I have found myself taking solace in new routines. I’ve never been someone who exercises, but in March I began to rely on the regularity of doing yoga every morning and going on a long walk every afternoon. I started measuring my coffee beans and hot water by the gram. For a time, I brushed my teeth three times a day. Every week, I would memorize a new poem. There is a sense of security that is generated by consistency, a continuity that helps me to reaffirm my sense of self, my identity. After all, what are we if not our routines, our habits?

For me, the shock of the pandemic, and the isolation that followed, made the constancy of routine appealing. But routine, I’ve found, goes hand in hand with change. We typically conceive of routine as an unthinking mechanical procedure, a prescribed way of doing something. The etymology of the word reveals that it comes from the Old French rute meaning “way” or “direction.” But further back, the word is derived from the Latin rupta, meaning “broken.” Rupta comes from the phrase via rupta, meaning “broken way,” and the related phrase rumpere viam, meaning “to open a path.” It’s fascinating to me that a word so closely associated with repetition has these meanings baked into its history. How might routine relate to its ancient origins in rupture, in radical change and new directions?

This year, routine has engendered in me a greater sense of attentiveness—daily attention to the small variations of life. For instance: walking down the same road each day and witnessing the trees coming into leaf. Discovering a new reading of a poem after having repeated it dozens of times. Noticing the quietness of the roads and the increasing boldness of squirrels, birds, and deer to venture near human beings. Feeling how my back stretches further than it has in the past when I lean forward to touch my toes.

Attending to these types of everyday phenomena has shown me that there really is no such thing as exact repetition; that in fact repetition produces difference even as it knits the days together. I think you all know this intuitively. You’ve experienced it in your own way—the power of routine as not stasis, but process. You’ve felt it over the years as you have mastered new skills, felt at home in new communities, fashioned new attitudes and forged new strengths. I hope that in this time of uncertainty, a time in which you may feel like your options are limited, you will pay attention to humble routines for signs of growth and integrity, a kind of perpetual becoming.

What I want to suggest today is that attending to your routines, both your physical habits and your habits of mind, can be a source of power. A routine is an ordered time and space that belongs to you. You can reflect on it and actively shape it. In a time of upheaval, paying attention to your automatic responses and developing strategies to process them may instill in you a sense of agency. If you can do this, your active habits and routines become a way that you can make room to reflect on and set intentions, to frame your personal and emotional life.

I think it is especially important to attend to our routines now, because this year we have been challenged to reconsider how we relate to each other and the world around us. Not only have we been forced to change the way we commune and demonstrate care: we have learned how to celebrate birthdays online, go on physically distant walks, to schedule phone or Zoom calls with friends. We have also been asked to reevaluate the routines and systems that undergird our society and that have produced stark inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. Let’s return to the Latin origins of “routine”—via rupta, “broken way”, rumpere viam, “to open a new path”. We are now challenged to confront ways in which our nation is broken—its unequal health care system, its unjust prison industry, its fatal and tragically habitual police violence—and to open new paths toward a more just society, new ways of imagining ourselves as agents of change.

Let me put it another way. This year we were challenged to rethink the way we breathe. If you, like me, took the ability to breathe for granted, Covid-19 presented the threat that this routine function could be taken away from us or our loved ones. The virus hit home; it forced us to alter our daily lives—to wear masks, avoid public space, and attempt to form routines that brought some measure of calm and joy. That’s not all: the virus made us aware that the very air around us connects us to others, that our individual actions are inextricably linked to the lives of others, and that our country’s flawed framework puts our most vulnerable populations in daily danger. These lessons were intensified by the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade and Rayshard Brooks, which reignited the cry, “I can’t breathe,” and reminded us painfully that for so many in this country, the right to breathe has never been taken for granted—that, in fact, it has always been under threat. The personal and the political, the routine and the radical, have never been so intertwined.

Perhaps we can think about this year as a year of breaking old and forming new routines, routines that make us feel a little more human, a little more capable of encountering and responding to difficulty. Perhaps this year is about the fusion of constancy and change—the daily effort to feel whole even as we feel ourselves,

our values and our politics being challenged, rerouted, broken down, reformed.

Can the active shaping of routine, of physical and emotional habits, be a modest form of resistance? Perhaps, if it helps us to feel balance in the face of uncertainty and isolation. Perhaps, if it encourages us to demonstrate care toward ourselves and others in the face of grief. Perhaps, if it awakens our attention, cultivates our awareness of our states of mind in the face of bewilderment. Perhaps, if it gives us the patience and strength to effect and accept change, a gradual transformation of our personal and political lives in the face of injustice.

This may be difficult work. We already have unhealthy habits and routines, harmful tendencies, prejudices and associations, carved into our bodies and brains. Old habits are like limestone; years of rain have carved tracks in the rock that we cannot help but follow. How can we soften our landscapes of habit? How can we remain vulnerable to new ways of being?

Perhaps practicing a routine is like making a pathway through a field of grass over time. The path is not made if you walk it once. It is created and maintained by repeated treading—the grass yields gradually to leave a soft dirt path, the gentle imprint of your daily strolls. What new pathways of hope and connection will you choose to traverse each day? What pathways of self-education and action, restfulness and reflection? What pathways of love?

I hope, in conclusion, dear graduates, that as you take your next step forward, you will find meaning and resilience in the daily tasks of living and thinking. Embrace routine as a vehicle of perseverance and progress. Practice your habits with intention, and let them nourish you in return. Go for a walk; remember to breathe; kindly remind yourself that you are ready for what is to come.