Alan Alda shares the rest of his life, so far

As we stand in one today, these are my parting words to my daughter Eve. They’ll come in a rush, because there are so many things I want to tell you, Eve. And the first one is: Don’t be scared. My guess is you’re feeling a little uncertain today. That’s okay; I’m uncertain, too. You’re an adult when the leaders of the world are behaving like children. The tune of the day is the song of the terrorist: humane concerns inhumanely expressed.

And you’re facing this sooner than I thought you would. Suddenly, you’re a grown woman. The day before yesterday, you were a baby I was afraid to hold because you seemed so fragile. Yesterday, you broke your small eight-year-old arm. Only this morning, you were a teenager.

As we get older, the only thing that speeds up is time. But as much as time is a thief, it also leaves something in exchange. With time comes experience—and however uncertain you may be about the rest of the world, you have the chance to keep getting better at the things you work at.

And that’s something else I want to tell you as we stand in this doorway today. Love your work. If you always put your heart into everything you do, you can’t lose. Whether or not you wind up making a lot of money, you will have had a wonderful time, and no one will ever be able to take that away from you.

I want to squeeze things great and small into this lingering goodbye. I want to tell you to keep laughing. I used to be afraid that writing and acting in comedies might be a frivolous occupation, but when I think of all the good that laughing does people, I get the feeling that making people laugh can be noble work. You have a wonderful laugh. You gurgle when you laugh. Keep gurgling. There are people who think that the only thing that separates humans from the rest of the animals is their ability to laugh. I’m not so sure anything separates us from the rest of the animals except our extreme egotism that leads us to think that they’re the animals and we’re not. But I notice that when people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another. So keep laughing, and if you can, get other people to join you in laughter.

I have this helpless urge to pass on maxims to you. But we live in new times. Strange times. Even the Golden Rule doesn’t seem adequate to pass on to a daughter. There should be something added to it. You know how I love amendments. You knew I wanted to amend the Constitution, but you probably didn’t know I wanted to amend the Golden Rule as well. Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others; then keep after them until they’re fair with you.

It’s a complex world. I hope you’ll learn to make distinctions. You know how much I love logic. I always felt that the most important parts of my education were learning to reason and to use language. That’s why when you were a very little girl I started trying to give you lessons in logic. I smile when I think that to this day, you can still remember what I taught you as a child—the first rule of logic: A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. (In your head, you’re saying that along with me right now, aren’t you?) I hope you’ll always make distinctions. A peach is not its fuzz, a toad is not its warts, a person is not his or her crankiness. If we can make distinctions, we can be tolerant, and we can get to the heart of our problems instead of wrestling endlessly with their gross exteriors. And once you make a habit of making distinctions, you’ll begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others. You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul, or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.

I want you to be as smart as you can, but remember: It’s always better to be wise than to be smart. And don’t be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom, because nobody knows where wisdom can be found. It tends to break out at unexpected times, like a rare virus to which mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible.

The door is inching a little closer toward the latch, and I still haven’t said it. You’ll be gone, and I won’t have found the words. Let me dig a little deeper.

Let me go back to when I was in college. There were ideas that had power for me then—maybe they will for you now. I’d almost forgotten how much one of those ideas meant to me—how much I wrote about it and thought about it. It was the essence of a philosophy that was very popular at the time, and it’s one of the most helpful and cheerful ideas I’ve ever heard.

It’s this: Life is absurd and meaningless and full of nothingness. Possibly this doesn’t strike you as helpful and cheerful, but I think it is— because it’s honest and because it goads you on.

I had a teacher in those days who saw me with a book by Jean-Paul Sartre under my arm, and he said, “Be careful. If you read too much of that, you’ll start walking around dressed in black, looking wan, doing nothing for the rest of your life.” Well, I did read the book, and as it turned out, I’m tanned and lovely, I’m rich and productive, and I’m happy like nobody’s business.

Maybe it was my natural optimism at work, but what I saw and warmed to in the existentialist’s writings was that life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; it’s up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something, it’s as though you aren’t there. Existentialism was supposed to be the philosophy of despair. But not to me. To me, it was the essence of hope—because it touched the cold, hard stone at rock bottom and saw it as a way to push off it and bounce back up again.

Back when I was reading the existentialists, we heard the news that God was dead, but now Sartre is dead, too, and so is Camus—and, in a way, so is the optimism at the heart of their pessimism. The distressing reality is that twenty-five years ago when I was in college, we all talked about nothingness but moved into a world of effort and endeavor. And now no one much talks about nothingness, but the world itself, the one you will move into, is filled with it. If you want, there’s plenty you can do to turn that nothing into something. You can dig into the world and push it into better shape.

For one thing, you can clean the air and water. Some people have said that lead poisoning was a major cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, because the ruling class had their food cooked in expensive pots that were lined with lead. They didn’t know any better, but we don’t have that excuse. Now, almost two thousand years later, we’ve hit upon the incredibly clever idea of getting rid of our industrial waste by putting it into our food. Not directly, of course; that would be too expensive. First they put it in the ground—then it goes into the water, and the next thing you know, you’re eating a sludgeburger. If you want, you can do something about that.

Or you can try to make the justice system work. You can bring the day a little closer when the rich and privileged have to live by the same standards as the poor and the outcast.

Or you can try to keep the tiger of war away from our gates for a while longer. You can do what you can to keep old men from sending children away to die. They’re tuning up for the song of war again. They’re making preparations and trial excursions. They’re tickling our anger. They’re asking us if we’re ready to pour the cream of our youth out onto the ground, where it will seep into the earth and disappear forever. You can tell them we’re not. The time to stop the next war is now—before it starts.

If you want to take absurdity by the neck and shake it till its brains rattle, you can try to find out how it is that people can see one another as less than human. How can people be capable of both nurture and torture? How we can worry and fret about a little girl caught in a mine shaft, spending days and nights getting her out, but then burn a village to the ground and destroy all its people without blinking? If you’re interested, you can question that, too, and you can try to find out why people all over the world, of every country, of every class, of every religion, have at one time or another found it so easy to use other people like farm animals, to make them suffer, and to just plain do away with them.

And while you’re at it, there’s something else you can do. You can pass on the torch that’s been carried from Seneca Falls. Remember that every right you have as a woman was won for you by women fighting hard. Everything else you have is a privilege, not a right. A privilege is given and taken away at the pleasure of those in power. There are little girls being born right now who may not have the same rights you do when they grow up unless you do something to maintain and extend the range of equality for women. The soup of civilized life is a nourishing stew, but it doesn’t keep stocked on its own. Put something back in the pot as you leave for the people in line behind you.

There are, of course, hundreds of things you can work on, and they’re all fairly impossible to achieve, so there’s plenty to keep you busy for the rest of your life. I can’t promise you this will ever completely reduce that sense of absurdity, but it may get it down to a manageable level. It will allow you once in a while to take a glorious vacation from nothingness and bask in the feeling that all in all, things do seem to be moving forward.

I want you to be potent; to do good when you can and to hold your wit and your intelligence like a shield against other people’s wantonness. I want you to be strong and aggressive and tough and resilient and full of feeling.

I want you to have chutzpah.

Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah. Do you wonder if you’re strong enough? Sure you are. Get a little perspective. Look up at the stars swirling in the heavens and see how tiny and puny they look. They’re gigantic explosions, but from where we are, they’re just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough, you realize how important and powerful you are. Be bold. Let the strength of your desire give force and moment to your every step. They may laugh at you if you don’t discover India. Let them laugh. India’s already there. You’ll come back with a brand-new America. Move with all of yourself. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory. Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. It is not the previously known. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there

by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing, but what you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

Those are my parting words as today’s door closes softly between us. There will be other partings and other last words in our lives, so if today’s lingering at the threshold didn’t quite speak the unspeakable, maybe the next one will.

I’ll let you go now.
So long, be happy.
Oh, by the way, I love you.

They awarded me a Connecticut College chair that day. An actual chair. I kept it by the front door for years to remind me of the afternoon I’d been able to open my heart to our first child. But as the years went on and I passed the chair in my comings and goings, I noticed that almost every problem I’d mentioned to her that day, almost everything I’d said she could work on fixing, had got worse. As our lives went on, the hopes I had for her grew even higher, but everything I’d mentioned about the world had sunk below sea level.

Eve went on to become a social worker, and she ran for office in her town and won. She did dig into the world; and if she couldn’t make it better, it wasn’t for lack of trying. But now for her, as it has been for me, there will be one sure way of finding purpose in her life. Now she has children.

And now I see, and so does she, that our job is not to shape them and badger them, but to love them. Simply love them. Love them. Love them.

Excerpted from “Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself” Copyright 2007 Alan Alda. Reprinted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved.

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