Camaraderie...

We're all human. Reading David Brooks' column about the Grant Study helped to remind me of the common challenges that so many of us face:

In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.

And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.

I'm reminded of the first commencement address I heard while a student at Stanford. Ted Koppel spoke that year (1986) and shared the story of a brilliant high school girl who seemed to have it made: athletic, intelligent, attractive, vivacious. And yet she took her own life just as she seemed to be off to an amazing future. It struck me then as a weird anecdote, but I think he was trying to warn those of us assembled there: It won't always be easy, this life ahead. Even under the best of circumstances you may all find it hard to cope at times.

True enough.

Koppel also quoted "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

It was my first year at Stanford; I was working as an usher that day. I remember looking down at the pavilion that had been built on the field of Stanford Stadium and having a sense of what it must have been like to have been a Roman watching the games in the Colisseum.

As Koppel spoke those words about sharing common experiences--like being in a crowd--across the centuries, I was struck because that was exactly what I'd been thinking about.

Regardless of what age we live in, what station we're born into, and what gifts we uniquely carry, in the end we are all human. Perfectly human. Which means being imperfect, and struggling to find our way in this world.

THERE'S MORE on the Grant Study in "What makes us happy?" in the June Atlantic magazine.

P.S. I'm reminded, just now, of Billy Joel's "Piano Man" and a post I wrote about it way back when...

The video is here.