Letter to the Editor
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
PHOTO CREDIT: TUDOR MARIAN/DREAMSTIME.COM
Best commencement I have heard
Dear Editor:
For 12 years, I had my answer ready whenever anyone asked about the best commencement speech ever given: Rear Admiral William McRaven, University of Texas at Austin, 2014. No hesitation. Case closed. Then last month, Eric Church walked onto a stage in Chapel Hill, and I had to rethink everything.
I should be honest about my biases. I attended UNC Chapel Hill — twice. So when the university announced that a country music star would be delivering the commencement address, I leaned in a little harder than most. But nothing prepared me for what happened next. I’ve now listened to that speech eight times and teared up during seven of them. That’s when I knew I had to write this down.
Admiral McRaven had set a high bar. He was magnificent — self‑deprecating from the first breath, telling the graduating class he barely remembered his own graduation. He advised that we should judge people by the size of their heart, not their résumé. Face failure; don’t flee it. Avoid the sharks. Never, never give up. It was practical, powerful, and built like a military operation — precise, purposeful, nothing wasted. McRaven gave a checklist on discipline, teamwork and dealing with people. A magnificent one.
Eric Church walked out and admitted, almost sheepishly, that he had spent months trying to figure out what on earth he was going to say. He wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t a general. He was a guy who wrote songs and played guitar. Then one evening on a family ski trip, he picked up his guitar — and realized the guitar was the speech.
The idea was simple: a guitar has six strings. When all six are in tune, they can carry joy and heartbreak, faith and pain, memory and hope all at once. One chord, played right, can stop a conversation cold or make a room full of strangers best friends for a few minutes. But let one string drift out of tune, and everybody in that room feels it immediately, whether they can name it or not.
Life, he said, works the same way. It runs on this principle. He then went into the priorities one should have in life, string by string.
The low E string is the thickest, heaviest, and the foundation chord. Every chord rests on this string being in tune. This string is your faith. Not the faith you grab in a crisis like a life preserver, but the faith you tend quietly in the ordinary, unremarkable seasons. The people who tend to their faith when life is calm do not come undone when the world tries to undo this string. Church said, “Tend to your faith not when you are broken, but when you are whole.” I was amazed that the university endorsed a speaker who came perilously close to using the “G” word.
The next string, the A string, represents family. It gives warmth to the chord. “The A string is not a holiday string,” he said. “It’s an everyday string.” Then he pointed toward the stands — toward all the parents and grandparents and siblings packed into those bleachers — and reminded the graduates that those people had loved them longer than they’d been easy to love. “You are about to get busy with all kinds of things at work or socially but always return to your family.” He was direct about what that means: You show up, consistently, even when it costs you something.
The D string is about love and partnership — the heart chord, he called it. Choosing the right person to share your life with, he said, is the most important decision you will ever make outside of your faith. That person will either amplify you or pull you apart. “Choose wisely, love fiercely.” Simple. Direct. Until someone says it out loud, you realize you’ve never quite heard it that plainly before.
Then he got to the G string — and he paused just long enough for the wave of laughter to subside, riding it perfectly before turning serious again. The G string drifts out of tune faster than any other because life never stops pulling on it. Two opposing forces live on this string: ambition, which gets battered, and resilience, which gets tested. Church encourages ambition and warns that resilience will be needed in the aftermath of failure. He quoted Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are stronger in the broken places.” And then, quietly: “When you fail — and you will fail — get back up. Tune the string. Keep playing.”
The B string is community. This was the sharpest observation in the speech, the one that hit me in a specific way. He warned that this generation faces a temptation no generation before them has faced quite so acutely: to be globally visible and locally invisible. Social media hands you an audience; it does not hand you a community. “Learn the actual names — not usernames — of the people around you,” he said. “Plant roots somewhere. Belong to something that is real.” The Rotary motto “Service before self” is a good guideline. I left Charleston when I was 14 and returned when I was 42 and still think, “Why did I ever leave this community!”
And the high E string — the one that carries the melody — is you. Your authentic self. This is the string most bent by outside pressure. Social media will show you 1,000 versions of a life that looks better than yours. The comparison will be relentless, curated and a lie. It will tempt you to retune yourself. Don’t let social media touch your string. Keep your original voice, your unique melody. “There’s a sound only you can make,” he told them. “The world does not need another cover song. It needs an original.”
He closed by acknowledging what every guitar player knows: Every string drifts out of tune eventually. Six strings, six principles, six pillars. They all drift. That’s not failure. That’s just the nature of the instrument and life. The goal is never perfection. The goal is to keep tuning — keep showing up, keep paying attention, keep playing all six. He asked the audience to trust what their hearts hear and what their hearts tell them about their song, and to play their song as he left them with his.
Then he put on a pair of Carolina Blue sunglasses, strummed his guitar, and performed “Carolina.” He had rewritten the lyrics on the spot to reflect the graduating class and his mother sitting somewhere in those stands. By the time the last chord faded, the silence before the applause was the kind that only happens when a room full of people is trying to hold something together.
Admiral McRaven gave a great speech. I loved that sailor’s message, especially because I was in the Navy. But Eric Church gave something rarer. He shared fundamental life lessons about faith, family, marriage, failure, resilience, relationships and community — a speech that made you feel these were tools you can use to shape a life well‑lived. You just have to keep tuning your strings. Watch the video, share it with family and friends. All will benefit, and what happens from here might change the world.
Go Navy! Go Heels! And God bless America!
Belk Daughtridge
51 Church St.
Charleston, S.C.
