The following entry is Benjamin Boas’s (Brown ‘06.5) speech given at Brown University’s Midyear Completion Ceremony. It is published with the permission of the author.

Members of the faculty, deans, friends, and family, thank you for coming to celebrate this great occasion.

Fellow classmates, I have three words to say to you right now‹we are done!

We’ve toiled through years of college, some more than others and some less.

We’ve listened to lectures, participated in seminars, crammed for exams, and cranked out pages of research that were due the next day. We’ve put in our time, and many of us have put in more than that. We’ve worked, traveled, taught, trained, explored and learned. Each one of us, in our own individual unique way.

And now, we’re done. Members of the prestigious and exclusive class of 2006.5, we did it!

Now what?

Starting next month, ‘real life’ begins. In a few years, we will all be in much different places than where we are right now. Some of us will stay in Providence, some of us will be in far away countries, some of us will work and some of us will stay in the Ivory tower as long as we possibly can.

Since we are a .5 class, I’m sure that many of us will wind up in some very interesting situations indeed. Before we step off onto our individual paths, I’d like to pose a question to you, on your journey through life, how will you measure your progress?

This is a tricky question, especially for a group like us. My trip through higher education has been an interesting one, as I’m sure have most of yours. I am a transfer, a leave-taker, and have just completed the 3rd semester of my senior year. Measuring my progress by that of my peers is simply not an option. I have no freshman unit, most of my friends are outside my class year and the people I graduated from high school with have long since left college.

Being on this non-standard journey, I often wonder, “Where does this leave me?’ There are no signposts, no clear indicators that I’m on the right track. I imagine myself standing on a mathematical plane, with Cartesian space running off into infinity in every direction. In five years, will I still be in this same space? What tells me that I’m moving on the right course? How do I graph the progress I’ve made when I’m not even sure what the axes are?

I’ve been searching for the answer to this question, and I’d like to share with you an anecdote I’ve picked up along the way. For the past year I’ve been writing a thesis on the gambling world in Japan. During my fieldwork, I came across a group of players who treated Mah Jong, a popular Asian gambling game, as a martial art. They call themselves the Jankikai.

When I say martial art, I don’t mean they attack each other with game pieces or have physical contact with one another. Jankikai’s conception of a martial art is a little different. Whereas most people who play Mah Jong focus on winning strategies to maximize their payoffs, this group focuses on form and aesthetics, believing that by striving towards the most beautiful game possible, they will become better human beings.

For example, Jankikai members regularly train in the handling of tiles, which make up the game of Mah Jong. The action that completes a round of Mah Jong, picking up one small tile and laying it on the table, does not take very much time at all. In Jankikai, this short time is shortened to the point of perfection. According to the group leader, the ideal handling of a Mah Jong tile is such that just enough force is used to handle the tile, and no more. He explains that this teaches people to live their lives in a way that never wastes energy.

Jankikai members train because they strive to be better human beings. While most of us share this desire, in all likelihood we will not be training in gambling games any time soon. A game played by Jankikai is certainly impressive to watch, but I don’t know how much the benefits of their training extends outside of the Mah Jong parlor.

But my opinion, I believe, is largely irrelevant. I think that Jankikai theory is a little off the deep end. I don’t think the couple of times I ‘trained’ there did much for me. But I know that the time members spend there does wonders for them. The reason is that the members of this group truly believe that what they are doing improves them as human beings.

Seeing the smile light up on a members faces when they enter the dojo was enough to convince me of this. Because they believe, they’re right. For those who believe, Jankikai works.

This is what I’d like to advocate today: believe in what you do.

The May when I look my leave from brown was one of the scariest times of my life. I had no idea what I would be doing. I didn’t even have a plan. All I had was a conviction that time off was the right thing for me at the time.

That conviction took me to construction work on a military base, a bartending license, and a backpacking trip across the Himalayas. I returned to Brown having learned to trust myself. If there’s anything that Brown’s open curriculum teaches you, it’s how to live with the choices you make.

This is not easy. I’ve been working on a thesis for the past two years.

Sometimes I wonder what, if anything, I’ve accomplished. My research won’t cure any diseases or solve any of society’s problems. I doubt any of you will ever buy a book on the conflation between Japanese masculinity and gambling.

When my thesis is bound, that stack of paper will be the only concrete thing I gain from its completion. Of course, I believe that it’s worth much more than that. I believe that an understanding of another culture’s leisure can lead to a greater understanding on the meanings people ascribe to life. I believe this with all my heart. And it’s this belief and only this belief which makes the work I put into my thesis worth it.

In some sense, belief is all you’ve got. Believing in what you do makes all the difference in the world. Much of everything else is either out of your control, or doesn’t matter. Our progress in life isn’t measured by where we live, what jobs we work or how much money we have. Consider a vice-president of a corporation who always kicks himself for not having been promoted to president yet. Consider a janitor working in the same building who’s underpaid but is so proud that he can put his first kid through college.

Who’s made more progress?

So where are you going to be in 5 years? Some of you already have a good idea of this. For those who don’t, I don’t have an answer for you.

I still don’t even know what I’m doing next month. But I can tell you this, don’t worry! Don’t worry about what you do in life. In it of itself, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think of it. What matters is where you think you’re going.

Let’s go back to my mathematical vision. No matter where you stand on that infinite plane of life, you’ve always got infinity behind you and you’ve always got infinity shooting out in front of you. Your position is indeterminate, but that doesn’t matter. You see, where you are doesn’t depend on where your feet stand, but where your head leads. It’s not where you are on the graph, it’s how you’re changing. It’s not your position, it’s your derivative. You can tell yourself you’re anywhere you want to be.

But first you have to believe.

The final arbiter of your progress, the ultimate arbiter of your progress, is you. You can’t control what you get from life. You can’t control where you’ll be in 5 years. A sociology professor at Brown once told me that half of life is chance. For the most part, we can’t control where we go in life.

We can’t change the things that happen to us. But you can change how you think of things and that changes you.

Set your own axes. Set your own derivative. Believe in what you do.

Thank you and good luck.

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