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| Living a Fruitful Life | |||||
| Frank Oppenheimer, Exploratorium Speech to the Graduating Class of Pagosa Springs High School, 1960 | |||||
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| In 1960, Frank delivered a speech to the graduating class of Pagosa Springs High School, a small Colorado school where Frank had been the sole science instructor from 1957 to 1959. Portions of this speech, which dealt with how to live a rich and fruitful life, seem appropriate to this website. | |||||
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| I am grateful for the life I have lived. It has certainly not been as full as the lives of some people, and yet it has probably been richer in experience and in a sense of accomplishment than the lives of many. I think that part of the sense of having lived a full and a rich life comes from an ability to continually take things seriously, but not too personally. This feeling stems from a willingness - even a determination - to become deeply involved in what you are doing, but not obsessed by it. I want to put a little more meaning into the phrase "taking things seriously." Perhaps I can best explain what I mean by talking about myself. I would say, for example, that I took my teaching in this school seriously. First of all, I thought it was an important job. I felt that if you learned some science, you would be able to lead better lives. And I felt that by trying to do a good job of teaching, I might have some effect not only on you individually but also on the school and the community. The teaching involved a lot of work and planning and I had to learn new things, not only about the subject matter, such as the names of the various geologic epochs, but also about how to present ideas that I was, at first, not able to get across. I stopped thinking of myself as a rancher or a nuclear physicist and thought of myself primarily as a high school teacher and wanted | |||||
| to be a good teacher. I wanted you to understand the things I enjoyed understanding, such as why a star got hot and stayed hot. I wanted you to get satisfaction from being able to do some of the things I found pleasure in doing, whether blowing glass or solving a problem. I felt an enthusiasm for the whole process of teaching. Now let me give you another example, in retrospect a quite trivial one. At about the time I graduated from college, I took coffee seriously. I read about coffee and found out where and how it was grown and roasted. I wandered about New York City looking for coffee import houses, bought my own grinder, and learned to | |||||