Commencement Address by Sela Ward
The University of Alabama
May 7, 2005

Dr. Witt, thank you for the generous introduction. It is truly a thrill and honor for me to be here today, back at my alma mater, in beautiful Tuscaloosa just miles from my late night haunt, Taco Casa...

When I received a call asking me to give the Commencement speech, naturally I was flattered. Of course, that lasted just until I hung up the phone and it dawned on me what a daunting proposition it was to stand before a very large and formidable class of graduating seniors who either can’t wait to get on with their lives or wish the music would never end.

Then I thought to myself: “What am I going to say? I wish I had some pearls of wisdom to offer the universe that would help solve world hunger or create world peace. I wish I had the answers to nuclear proliferation or terrorism, but I don’t.” What could my speech be about except to thank the University for asking me with a couple of “Roll Tides” thrown in.

After several futile attempts to come up with something “profound” to say to you today, it dawned on me that clearly I was asked to speak to you because I represent an Alabama alum who went on to some modicum of success. My mission is to encourage and beckon you graduating seniors to the world that awaits you… and inspire you to dream a little.

In remembering the day I was sitting where you are, all I could think of was that my incredible experience in college was over. I had to leave the cocoon of Tuscaloosa for a world I didn’t understand and which I probably wasn’t ready for. Should I embark on a profession or look for a husband? (Lord knows, Mama and Daddy weren’t going to keep paying my bills!) Should I stay close to home or venture afar? Dare I think for myself or should I let others decide for me?

Perhaps you are asking yourselves the very same questions?!

After all, the world today does not offer wider horizons or better opportunities — just different ones. So I would like to speak to you from my vantage point about what I think will be most useful as you “commence” — begin your journey in the real world. It’s an exciting journey that can be taken and enjoyed if you are ready. I stand here, representing what every one of you can achieve in your own way, and I assure you that the gap between us is not as wide as you might think and truly not as formidable or difficult to bridge as you may fear. It is not filled with wild beasts or impossible barriers. The obstacles and the potential for setbacks are there, but they are part of what will strengthen you. And, if you pay attention, you will learn and grow from them.

Are you ready?

For myself, I was not ready, nor willing and able at the age of 21, on my graduation day. I had thoroughly enjoyed every moment of my life here, where I started out as an honor student and a very active extra-curricular participant. But, after falling in love with my Crimson Tide football player, let’s just say I became a “just in time and just enough” academic student. Looking beyond graduation, I had no idea what I was going to do.

Where were the secrets of the universe I could call upon? When would mentors show up to show me the way? Where was my Mama in all this? My Dad? A wise uncle or aunt?

Guess what? No secrets dropped from the heavens, no mentors came a’knockin.’ And, my Mama, she wanted me to take a job with Bell Telephone where the benefits would stay with me my entire life and, of course, get married. If only she could have told me what years of hard knocks, successes and failures taught me. But if she had – would my journey have been as fruitful? Would my achievement have been my very own? Did I wish for a short cut? Don’t we all? But there are none.

So I am here to tell you the things I NOW wish my Mama had been able to tell me back then – not shortcuts, but things that I believe would have helped me on the path from being a college senior to building my life and achieving success. And I say it to you with a full heart, yet knowing full well that it is your spirit and your trust in yourself that is the real guide and true companion.

The heartbeat of what I want to share with you comes down to a lot of CPR - Courage, Perseverance and Resilience with plenty of Humor and Serendipity thrown in along the way..

Let’s take Courage – What is courage? We know what the lion in the Wizard of Oz thought courage was. But what is courage to you? How does one prevail over fear and concentrate on good decisions that factor in risk, acknowledge one’s important needs and keep dreams alive?

Does courage mean letting go of the “sure thing” (in my case the job with Bell Telephone) in favor of heading off to Memphis for a job with Pepsi? I’d like to say it was courage in my case, but it wasn’t only that. I chose Memphis because it was the best job I could get that was close enough, but still far enough from home. Yet even this small step opened the way to travels that ultimately led me to this crazy business I’m in -- with many hurdles along the way… such as disastrous auditions, people who said I didn’t have what it took to make it, and so on.

Fear is the enemy of courage, and yet we all experience fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of failure based on previous perceived failures and disapproval. We may avoid moving forward, or we may rigidly hold on to a negative script as an excuse for not taking risks. Remember, fear is but a sly trickster. Fear is your adversary. And as Roosevelt famously said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” So overcoming Fear, AKA “Courage,” comes in small and large bites… and so I count courage as a cornerstone trait for success.

Perseverance or “persistent determination” which includes tenacity and focus on one’s goal means that you will not permit yourself to be distracted, discouraged or talked out of your path. Every occupation brings with it speed bumps and road blocks along the way. How you react, how you bounce back, how you draw lessons out of failure will determine how persistent you can be and, ultimately, how successful you will be.

For me, after being devastated by the first handful of failures, I came to learn that, in every loss, there is an opportunity to learn something – either about myself or about the world around me. That one of the best things I could develop is the ability to get right back up after being knocked down. That if I crashed and burned on a film, in an audition or in a relationship -- that which didn’t kill me made me stronger. Being stronger made me able to know that there is always another opportunity around the corner.

I have always loved the expression “Where God closes a door he opens a window.” It took me awhile to get to this point, but my universe shifted the day I got there.

When I speak of Perseverance, I am thinking of holding on to your own sense of trust in yourself and your goal… and not sponging up the negativity that may come at you from others, even those who seem to have the power and authority to use the NO club. Remind yourself that pursuing the avenues of possibility takes time and energy. Often, those in power, will not spend their time and energy on you. It is easier for them to say NO and be done with it. In the movie “MILLION DOLLAR BABY,” Morgan Freeman’s character comments “If there is magic in boxing, it’s the magic of fighting battles beyond endurance. It’s the magic of risking everything, for a dream that nobody sees but you.” You may be disappointed but you will call on your perseverance and await your next chance – for there will be a next chance….

Early on I fell prey to this “NO” tactic over and over again. Starting at 15 years old and winning a local department store contest to be in an ad for Seventeen Magazine for a national teen clothing company, I along with three other young girls from around the country was flown to St. Louis to shoot the magazine ad. Exciting to say the least, it was every young girl’s fantasy... But at one point during the trip, the top ad executive for the company proclaimed that none of us had what it took to be a model. POOF! My bubble burst. There went my secret dream, for he certainly must know what he was talking about!

Cut to five years later, through a series of serendipitous connect-the-dots… I was signed by Wilhelmina models in New York City. Okay, so maybe I didn’t have the “look du jour” or the “height” to be one of the TOP models of that time, but I had enough of what it took to make a good living at it and survive in Manhattan. That was good enough for me.

Resilience. What is resilience? For my young kids it is my daughter’s ability to recover from her hair not looking just the way she wants as she heads off to first grade in the morning. For my son, it is the ability to deal with his beloved LA Laker basketball team not making the playoffs. But in adults, it is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. It has buoyancy in it. It is “buoyancy” that is particularly important and differs from perseverance. For while getting back on the horse shows perseverance, it is the attitude you bring to recovering yourself that holds the key to how you will experience the universe. With buoyancy, one is very much like a submerged object, refusing to be held under water, choosing instead to POP back up to the surface.

In the first months of being out in LA to pursue my acting career, I went in on an audition for a television show called EMERALD POINT NAS. I was given two scenes to read the night before by my agent so that I could properly prepare. When I arrived at the audition I was handed 12 pages of scenes I had never seen before. Clearly this was not cool. But I had enough naivety and just the right amount of hubris to think that I could wing this. The only problem was I was reading in front of five producers, not just the casting director.

She was seated in front of the row of producers – her face out of their eyesight. I bravely started the dialogue and immediately got flustered and asked to start over, at which point she rolled her eyes, looked to her assistant at her left, as if to say, how could you embarrass me with THIS one! And with great disdain again prompted me for the first line.

Well, needless to say, I should have just excused myself and left the room… for I was horrified, terrified and, at this point, a shell of my former self. I left the audition in the pouring rain, pulled up to a phone booth (yes, if you can believe, there actually was a time before cell phones) and called a dear friend hysterically crying and exclaiming that I was on the next plane back to New York! This woman was so cruel, yada yada…

Well, I didn’t go back to New York. I decided instead to pull myself up by the bootstraps and recognized what I didn’t know (which in this case was how to cold read) and got myself into an additional acting class on this very technique.

Cut to…they cast another actress for the role, shot the pilot, decided that she wasn’t right, and they hired a new casting director. Once again, I was asked to audition for the same role in the same show and this time I was REALLY prepared. I knew how to protect myself, making sure I had the correct material ahead of time. I auditioned and got the part!

I could easily have hopped on that plane back to NY…back to a comfort zone…back to playing it safe and not having to challenge myself too much. I have many of these stories from the past 20 plus years that I have mined my way through the entertainment business. I have bombed many an audition with comments like “she’ll be ready in about four more years” or an acting coach I hired to help me with one of my first big roles playing opposite Tom Hanks in a movie called NOTHING IN COMMON, actually saying to me after the second time I worked with her: “I’m not quite sure how you got this part…my daughter would have been much better for the role…”

Welcome to Hollywood, the land of sharks and undermining and envy and always GREAT POSSIBILITY…Courage, Perseverance, Resilience.

Tenacity is an aspect of perseverance that requires the patience and humility to take life one day at a time in the pursuit of the high goals we set for ourselves, whether personally, professionally or spiritually. There are many folk tales that praise tenacity. There is the story of the King who has a daughter of marrying age. The King announces: “I will give my daughter’s hand in marriage to the man in this kingdom who can jump to the top of this big staircase that leads to her chamber.” So, of course, all the guys are thinking, “OK, here’s my chance, I’m going to do this.” And all the big athletes come and they train, and they all take a shot at it. They go to the stairs and they try different approaches. Some of them stand there and leap, others take a running start. But in every case they land on the staircase and fall down to the bottom.

And then there is one little guy – he’s kind of a nerdy type who says “I’ll take a crack at it.” Everyone laughs. So he goes to the bottom of the stairs and looks up to the top and he takes a deep breath and he jumps…onto the bottom step. Everybody laughs even harder. And then he jumps to the second step, then to the third, to the fourth, to the fifth, until eventually he has jumped all the way to the top and he gets the princess. Point being… that seemingly unachievable goals are made up of smaller achievable goals that can be accomplished by persistence and tenacity. Your own uniqueness, when combined with the experience and lessons you glean from those around you, creates a special energy that can propel you forward with “persistent determination.”

Humor: If you think about it, much of what happens to us and others, much of what we react to in relationships, in accidental happenings and even in tragedy has a humorous side to it. Maybe that is why Shakespeare’s plays that do not end in everyone’s death are called comedies. Did you notice that many movies labeled comedy are actually quite sad, as well?

Humor is always present and it is for us to find it and include it in our attitude toward life and its vicissitudes. If you can laugh at yourself you are less likely to sink into discouragement, blame others or simply feel despair. Life, if you really look at it, is like the “theater of the absurd”- we’re all a part of this play. Take the time to look around you and notice the absurd and comical side of life. It will tickle your mind and energize you. Humor is a great assistant, and it leads you to discover joy and hope. It helps to understand things like – Serendipity.

Serendipity may be the hardest to “trust.” It involves so much that seems out of our control. The dictionary defines it as “the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.” The real question is how do we make FORTUNATE discoveries by ACCIDENT? Can we actually plan for and initiate these fortunate accidents? Maybe the answer lies partially in practicing perseverance, resilience and tenacity. But it takes more than that. It takes incorporating other life skills into the fabric of your life, such as “knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know.”

You aren’t expected to know everything, and while NOBODY holds the keys of wisdom that will unlock the box for you, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience lying low on the tree for picking from friends, relatives, associates, and people who cross your path.

Beyond that, a lot of the knack for creating serendipity in your life lies in your ability to develop your peripheral vision. Some of us have a plan and some of us take it day to day.

Some of us wake up looking straight ahead and some of us look left and right. While you have your eyes focused steadfastly on the road you are traveling, there is a road or roads not taken. And, while the laws of physics dictate that unfortunately we can only be in one place at one time, through peripheral vision we can see a really broad spectrum and thus the opportunity for avoidance of mistakes AND the opportunity for “fortunate accidents” that were not a part of the original plan.

Ask any person you know who is successful if they stayed solely on the path they set out on or if at some point or many points along the way they derailed themselves from the path “du jour” to venture down a “road not taken.” Fact is, God drops gifts in your lap all the time. You just have to be ready and willing to recognize them as such.

Sometimes, serendipity does come down to being in the right place at the right time. George Clooney, who played my husband on the TV show, SISTERS, recently happened to be going on a motorcycle trip from Lake Como through the hills of Italy on his way to Milan. Harley Davidson had loaned him and his buddies bikes for this trip and they happened to be stored at my friend’s villa in Lake Como.

Ok, let me set the scene. We are all having lunch the day George and his friends stop by to pick up their bikes. We wish them “bon voyage” and off they go. The next day, we get a call. As they were winding their way through the mountains of northern Italy, in the middle of nowhere, George’s bike breaks down. He walks over to the nearest house, knocks on the door and it is opened by a young 17 year old Italian girl. She takes one look at him, starts HYSTERICALLY screaming “Oh my God , it’s George Clooney…I watched your movie last night and prayed to God “PLEASE SEND ME GEORGE CLOONEY, PLEASE GOD SEND ME GEORGE CLOONEY! AND HERE YOU ARE!!!!” Now, what are the chances of that in the middle of nowhere rural Italy? Just another fortunate accident…

As one looks back at the path of their life, there are serendipitous moments at almost every turn. As my dead-end job with Pepsi was ending and I had my sights on a way to get to New York…I happened to be sitting on a plane to Atlanta next to a young man who told me he ran an audio-visual production company based in both New York and Atlanta. You better believe I jumped all over that!

The next thing I knew, I had a meeting in New York to apply for a job at this production company, drawing up story boards. I got the job and off I went. It wasn’t the perfect job for me…it wasn’t in my comfort zone. It wasn’t enough money to live in Manhattan the way I would choose to — BUT IT GOT ME THERE!! Had I not been open to talking to the man, had I not seized the opportunity to push for an interview…had I not recognized the opportunity…

Oh, perhaps you are thinking: Sela is so lucky, yes, she had a few knocks but…. The world is her oyster. I want to remind you that luck and opportunity are like gold nuggets in a river – they are available to everyone. You have to look for them, you have to believe in their presence and NOTICE them. Make sure you are not walking around with your eyes wide shut, blaming others.

You may remember Sisyphus who was punished by the Greek Gods for his “trickery.” Could it be that the Gods took it as an offense that he was “thinking out of the box”, not entirely submissive and obedient?! His punishment was that he was compelled to roll a heavy stone to the top of a slope, the stone always escaping him near the top and rolling down again. Quite often this myth is seen as a metaphor for human life – an endless and frustrating labor over which man has no control.

One can wonder why this myth has survived and is part of our cultural history? The same story could have had Sisyphus realizing his errant ways and begging the Gods for forgiveness. But no! He didn’t do any of that.

As I come to the end of my remarks, I can think of no better way than spotlighting the French writer, Albert Camus’ take on the myth of Sisyphus, which was that he stands for all of us, if we think of him in another way. Sisyphus persisted in his task with integrity and strength of spirit.. He did not accept the punishment--he DEFIED it by converting the cruel Gods’ decree into a task he was determined to execute with his own control and self-respect. He did not fall into depression and self-pity. He did not plead with the Gods or blame them! He created a challenge and contributed to humanity by prevailing!

Was he a trickster or was he a hero? I think of him as a human who embodied the principles of Courage, Perseverance, Resilience and Tenacity.

I hope there was humor there, as well.

May 2005 Commencement Information