Mind the Gap

Thank you, President Fuchs and all those on the stage and those who played a role in making this happen, and personally, for inviting me to this august and celebratory occasion. 

Graduates, congratulations, and congratulations to your loved ones and families.

Today we celebrate you for successfully completing your University of Florida degrees. But today also marks the start of your next big adventure. Today is really a beginning, not an end. That’s why we call it “Commencement.” 

I want to share that I, too, am commencing today.

Unlike all of you graduates who have spent one or two or three or four or more years here, I am brand new at UF.

In fact, my family and I moved here exactly nine days ago from Nashville. I had been at Vanderbilt University for 18 years, but because of the compelling vision of Classical & Civic Education of the Great Books curriculum at the Hamilton Center, I convinced my wife that we should move to Gainesville. 

She noted that we’ve been moving further south since 2001. After receiving my own Ph.D. in 2001, we moved from England back to the U.S. where I took my first fulltime post in Boston. In 2006, we moved from Boston to Nashville, and now in 2024 from Nashville to Gainesville. That coincided with moving from a larger metropolis in New England with an NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS teams to Nashville with an NFL, NHL and MLS teams, to Gainesville with the proud tradition of Florida Gators in the Swamp. 

I feel insecure, dislocated, as well as excited. In that regard, you and I may be on similar emotional wavelengths.

You’re starting a brand new chapter of life; some of you do know where you are headed next, and others of you feel rather anxious about it, and even those of you who do know where you are going, might experience the same range of emotions of anxiety and excitement.

If you feel this way, let me tell you a story that I hope will give you some reassurance and confidence.

I am a child of immigrants; in fact, I am an immigrant myself. My family crossed the Pacific Ocean when I was 15 years old in January 1983. 

My father ran a company in Seoul, Korea, and to make an otherwise very long story short, when I was 9, something happened. incarceration happened.

For reasons that were beyond my understanding, my late father was thrown into prison. And for the next three years, he was in and out of prison for various trumped-up charges – that he was a tax evader or political prisoner.

My mom raised me and my older sister and younger brother for those three years as a temporary single mother. As you can imagine, I was confused, angry even ashamed of what had happened to my family. Even as a youngster, I dreamed of better tomorrow; you see I wanted to find a place or community where they would embrace me without judging me. That was hard to find. When my father was released, things were very challenging, such that life outside of Korea would provide much better opportunities for our desires for flourishing rather than staying in my country of birth.

So, the next phase of my life was immigration at 15. Not speaking any English; life was not easy; I was trying to find where and among whom I would belong. Again, I thought that by coming to the U.S., life would become instantly better. Well, we started our life in Disney in the U.S.; how much better can you start? But that was just the beginning of a very, very dark high school experience. That meant that there was a continual longing to belong. 

Incarceration, followed by immigration, and that eventually led me to an invitation to true belonging. When I was 21, as a junior in college, something crucial happened that is what I would call an invitation to true belonging. That is my religious conversion experience. 

This leads me to the first of my three POINTS for you today. Very simply, find the community of true belonging. Find a group of people who will not love you any better when you get a 4.0 or love you any less when you just aren’t performing at your expected level of excellence. Some find it in student organizations; others find it in activities and pursuits that go beyond the classroom; some find it in their labs or theaters. That true identity that supersedes and indeed gives meaning to all your other myriad identities.

Today you will be given a new identity: that of joining a worldwide circle of being a proud alumna or alumnus of the University of Florida. That’s an awesome chorus of people, ranging from Robert H. Grubbs and Marshall Nirenberg who were awarded the Nobel Prizes in chemistry and medicine, respectively. Then you also have Emmit Smith and Tim Tebow who went from here to the NFL; also are Faye Dunaway, Erin Andrews, and Titus O’Neill who spoke at the 2020 commencement. Lastly, there is also a legend of Tom Petty and his UF affiliation from which the faithful of the Gator Nation simply won’t back down. I am sure I will hear that song at least 10 times in my first 10 month at UF!

In all seriousness, however, identities do matter. Your UF identity, as good and glorious it may be, especially on days like today, can never be your ultimate identity. Then what is? Some of you are familiar with “Breaking Bad” and the main character played by Bryan Cranston. Cranston starred in another hit drama series called “Your Honor.” There is a poignant exchange between the assistant U.S. attorney and Eugene Jones, a 15-year-old boy who lost his mother and all three siblings to a mob-related hit job and is now entering the witness protection program to keep himself alive: all of his previous identities will be erased and be no more. “For the rest of your life, when you hear someone say the name Eugene, your heart is going to skip a beat, but you can never acknowledge and say, yes, that’s me. It will hurt to hide your true identity and live under a new and false identity. But, regardless of what anyone calls you, you will always be Kofi’s brother and Female’s son, you’ll always be Eugene Jones, because that name makes you who you are.”

Identities give you a sense of true belonging. Know where you belong …

Let’s be honest: This is so much easier said than done. I am way too Korean culturally for many Americans and way too American for many Koreans. I am inexcusably too conservative for my liberal friends and intolerably too liberal for my conservative friends. You get what I mean?

For a while I tried to resolve that tension of not belonging anywhere perfectly.  But I came to realize in my mid-50s that it actually is okay to not find a perfect community. I came to realize that if you are patient and generous with yourself and others, you can find a community that works for you, where you feel you belong, and where others welcome and embrace you.

This gets me to my second point, which is to “mind the gap.”  

Mind the gap. I think that’s perhaps the most important thing I learned while doing my Ph.D. work in England. While I was at Cambridge, I often went down to the British Library in London for research. However, the most important lesson I learned was not in a rare books or manuscript room there. Instead, it was in these London tube stations, where each time the door opened of these subway trains, the announcement would come on and say, “mind the gap!” That meant literally, being careful of the gap between the platform and the train because if you don’t see that gap, you will fall right through.  

Mind the gap between who you say you are and who you really are. The gap between confession and action. In the past 10 to 15 years, as a society, we here in the U.S. have become more polarized, both culturally and politically, and that tsunami is happening in other parts of the world as well. We have become more vicious and so quick in seeing the absolute worst of our cultural, political, or religious others, and we have become so slow in seeing our own areas for growth and blind spots. 

We have to mind the gap! See the gap within us: the gap of hypocrisy; See the gap within others: the same gap of hypocrisy and falling short of our own stated aims and purposes. If and when I know that I have a secure sense of belonging, I can be empowered to mind the gap and be less vicious toward those with whom we disagree and move toward greater expressions and experiences of virtue. 

That leads me to my final message: “leave it better.”

I hate to break this to you: but our beginnings, our “commencings” will come to an end. None of us has that insight into the exact date or even the week or even the month or year of that expiration date. Precisely because we don’t know when we will leave this earth, we are forced to think about what kind of legacy we will leave behind. So, we do have this great responsibility to leave it better. 

Do you believe in equality of all people, regardless of gender, race, socio-economic backgrounds? Whether it is a result of the French Revolution or the teachings of Jesus, Buddha or some other key thinkers and activists, most people today believe as an inviolable axiomatic truth the notion of fundamental equality of all. 

That’s a relatively recent notion. Let me illustrate it this way: Mahatma Gandhi was possibly one of the greatest political leaders of the 20th century. Do you know what he did and taught his followers to do the same? He cleaned latrines and toilets as a way of demonstrating that no job was too low for anyone to take and that a profession does not define anyone’s fundamental identity or diminish one’s inherent sense of dignity. Leave it better. Mahatma Gandhi did. 

Think of every other freedom fighter throughout human history; they dreamed of a better tomorrow and left their world better than how they found it! 

Here’s a quote from an early modern text. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” This is the first question in the Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563 within the first 50 years of the split within Western Christianity as the massive confusion was unleashed by the political, cultural and religious reconfigurations wrought by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. 

Amid the cacophony and upheaval of culture, politics and religion, people were asked what their only comfort was. You know how the answer was constructed? It said, “My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own but belong with body and soul both in life and in death to someone other than and beyond myself!”

Living for something beyond oneself. That’s the definition of leaving it better. You see earning a degree from UF is not a right, but privilege. And privilege entails responsibility. You have to use this degree for something other than mere self-aggrandizement. Leave this place better because you were here! 

Paul Lim is a professor of humanities at the University of Florida's Hamilton Center and an award-winning historian of early modern England -- with special emphasis on the Reformation and its consequences in Europe. He has authored and edited three books and is working on a fourth, titled “The Forgotten God? Christology in Enlightenment England.”