Khaled Hosseini
Web Editor’s Note: This is a commentary piece.
Khaled Hosseini, critically acclaimed author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” and this year’s guest speaker at the fifth annual convocation, asserted that amidst our successes, we are still only just by-products of luck.
For example, hard work might have played its role in bringing you to WT, or helped you land an athletic scholarship, or even gave you the desire to teach and educate and learn; however, luck let you live in America.
Luck didn’t place you in some remote desert in Afghanistan, living each day under the constant threat of Al Qaeda, fighting for the privilege to live freely.
Luck didn’t place you in some African jungle, under the constant threat or radical leadership, trying to find a modicum of humanity.
Instead, luck gave you chance.
And while I believe Hosseini to be correct, I can’t help but ponder another great question—Why? Why I am here in little ol’ Canyon, at WTAMU, writing this article for you to read?
He gave me the answer how I got here — random positive design, but he failed to give me the reason for me being here, an answer I have to find for myself.
I’m not going to pretend as if this question is original or even deserving of your time so quit here if you don’t want to continue, but I thought about this during the entirety of convocation.
I’m nothing extraordinary. I’m not a world famous writer like J.K. Rowling (I refuse to say Stephanie Myers, author of Twilight, is good at anything, unless writing junk on paper constitutes as “good”). I’m not some brilliant physicist like Albert Einstein, or even as brilliant as the newly appointed Nobel Peace Prize recipient President Barak Obama, (Please no hate mail). I’m just Dino Griego, a small town citizen who went off to a small town college.
I was talking to a friend of mine about the future, claiming that one day I will be brilliant and that he will be equally as amazing.
I was holding on to the belief that time makes us wiser, makes us more of a man, if you will. But as our conversation went on, I thought “what’s keeping me from being brilliant now?”
I fundamentally believe that as Americans, we have begun to lose faith in our individual abilities. In “Doubt,” Father Flynn, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, argues “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”
In a day and age where people are falling in love with ideas of who they want to be, we lose our identity.
Because we have lost our tenacity, we feel the warmth of the world through a tainted apparatus — and I don’t mean snuggies.
Essentially, because we can’t see ourselves positively, we haven’t been able to utilize our potential. The answer to my question: “what’s keeping me from being brilliant now?” is lack of faith in myself. Because I lack faith in the concepts of who I am, I have no idea what the future holds, and I wonder why am I here.
I am lost, and that proclamation frightens me.
But as Father Flynn also declared, “when you are lost, you are not alone.” And that knowledge sustains me.
As I try to bring this complicated, often-random thought to a close, I appreciate the impact convocation had on me. How it allowed me to settle some of these issues, issues I have been struggling with for a while.
Hosseini says that through hard work and a bit of luck we can accomplish many great things. And I want to pass that information along to you. No one, no thing, no idea should enable you from doing something extraordinary, something brilliant. Therefore, if you’re a broadcasting major, go to New York and reach for the stars, if you an equestrian major, ride that horse onto greener pastures.
As a Readership WT African Ambassador, I hope the 16 finalists going to Turkey ponder these questions as well.