To listen to Dr. Kate Tom Staples Lehrer's commencement remarks, click here.

"Now, my fellow Graduates, congratulations to you! You’ve pulled off quite an accomplishment! I hope you take pride in it and know you’ve done something special – something important.

I confess that when I was sitting where you now are, I knew I was supposed to feel liberated and excited about the future, but I was mostly just scared. What if, after agonizing over what I wanted to do when I grew up, I really didn’t like it? What if I wasn’t ready to grow up? What if I couldn’t cut it out there? Those were some of the questions running through my mind on this day those many years ago.

The power of questioning — something I’d discovered big time here at TCU – and what I’d like to emphasize this afternoon – had taken hold a little better that day than I’d really wanted.

The same kind of ruminations may be running through some of your heads. At first I thought the best thing I could do was to divert you with “back in the old days stories.” You know – what we had to put up with and you didn’t.

For instance, the housemothers checked our rooms each week, graded us on tidiness and posted the results in the lobby for all to see. I always suspected that this was to alert prospective husbands to our housekeeping abilities.

When we signed in at night, these women also checked our breaths for alcohol and tobacco. At the time what I didn’t take into account was the effect on the poor housemothers! Forget the alcohol, think of the garlic and onions!

But I want to do more than divert you. I’d like to leave you with something that might filter through from the haze of this day. I’d like to share with you the legacy TCU left me because there was a lot more going on than rules.

From the very beginning here I was like a kid in a toyshop of ideas. I learned to analyze and to question and finally, to think for myself.

It’s not that before I came, I didn’t think I thought for myself. Except questioning your family isn’t exactly the same as questioning your own motives and beliefs, questioning the acceptance of conventional wisdom around you, or questioning the values in your larger world. That’s what I started doing at TCU and never stopped. I hope that’s what you started doing, too ---- and you never stop.

Questioning is a gift of life. Curiosity is at the center of the life force. It’s what makes for growth, for conversation, for love, for imagination, for satisfaction. To refuse to question, to refuse to go farther in our thinking, to refuse to entertain uncertainty is to cut ourselves off from the exciting part of life. The great American writer Henry David Thoreau said that most lead lives of quiet desperation. I believe that if we cultivate our sense of curiosity, we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to lose the spark of wonder. And that wonder, that curiosity takes many different forms.

There’s a small story about E.O. Wilson, one the world’s leading naturalists and foremost authorities on ants. Once, Wilson was on a stopover in Brazil on his way to the rain forest. When it came time for breakfast, a traveling companion of his couldn’t find the great man. Now, Wilson is an extraordinarily tall man and one not easily lost in any group, but he was nowhere to be found until his companion noticed a crowd gathered in the center of the city square. Sure enough, the object of their curiosity, crouched on his hands and knees, cheek touching the already hot pavement was Dr. Wilson, studying with utter absorption a colony of everyday, garden-variety ants. After all those years of research and books and papers, he had not lost his curiosity for the ordinary .... the familiar in life.

Related to this, of course, are the unusual moments – that need for a once in a lifetime look at something. We attend live events – ball games, concerts, plays, graduations – for this reason. We are curious enough to want to be part of that one special experience.

This kind of curiosity leads us also into engagement with the world. Some may seek to make life a little better or more bearable. Others reach out with single acts of kindness.

Obviously, allowing our curiosity to reign is not all fun and games. Questioning means opening ourselves to uncertainty. Curiosity may expose us to the new which makes us vulnerable.

We become uneasy with the questions. What is required of me to live in this 21st century? How much do I personally need to conform? What is the other side saying about my pet issue – and why? Are my own biases getting in the way of an honest assessment? Even to ask this stuff requires us to read, to watch, to reach out, and to listen.

Frankly, sometimes I don’t really want to ask those questions myself. The process makes me anxious, fearful, not quite in control. It means getting out of my comfort zone, and that’s why it’s difficult to go there with any regularity.

Who really wants the uncertainty of knowing that you don’t know it all? Who doesn’t like feeling smug and righteous? I admit I sort of envy those people who are confident in their opinions, always so sure their way is the only way. Sometimes I would still love to go back pre-TCU to seeing the world in blacks and whites.

But I can’t afford to stop questioning anymore than you can. That is when we start shriveling. That is when we stagnate. And we are in danger. The more highly educated we are, the more opinionated we are – a bunch of know-it-all’s if we aren’t careful.

By questioning, however, I don’t mean just on an intellectual and emotional level. I also mean questioning or remaining curious as a form of trying, of doing.

My early role model goes back to my mother, the third of six sisters and one brother. Their father was a tyrant. The girls weren’t allowed to further their educations after high school, or go to work, or date or to marry. His rule held until my mother came along. On her graduation from high school – this would have been in the 1920's – she got herself a job keeping books in McKinney at the Ford dealership, where her father bought a new car every year. Of course, as soon as he heard, he promptly demanded she quit or the Ford people fire her or he would never buy a new car there again. Neither gave in to the old codger. My mother went on to put a younger sister through business school in Dallas.

Growing up, I didn’t understand how her questioning of the system influenced me. She questioned the place of women in our society long before the feminist movement of the 60's came along. I was seven when my father died, and she went back to work to support the two of us. She had no problem with this; she loved work. One of the themes of my childhood, though, was the unfairness of unequal pay for equal work. For that matter, she had low tolerance for injustice of any kind involving women or men.

Now a leap from my mother in McKinney, Texas to the Swiss sculptor Giacometti, whose quest led him to create breath-taking work. ...There’s a quote by him about his art that I wish I could hand out to each of you as a bumper sticker for your mirror. It goes like this: “I see something, find it marvelous, and want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary.”

He’s found a lovely way to talk about life as a dynamic process, not a series of goals we set for ourselves: if only I can get this, I’ll be happy. When I achieve that, my world will change. If only I’d gotten a better grade or that promotion - you know the plot line.

In fact, studies show we adjust upwards or downwards pretty quickly and then go right back to feeling much the way we did before anything happened.

Which brings me again to the scary results of curiosity when it comes to a new undertaking. Because whether we’re trying a new sport or a new project or a new situation, none of us want to look like fools. Nobody enjoys being frightened or uncomfortable, myself included.

When I write my novels, the deeper I go – and I always try to – the more I’m likely to make myself uncomfortable by stirring up the pot, grappling with conflicting desires in the human condition, asking hard questions about meaning. Yet this kind of anxiety is part of the process, not only of writing, but of living.

Anytime we venture forth we’re at risk, and we might lose. For most of us, not losing is more important than winning. Often we have to push ourselves to take those chances.

Of course, it’s not as if I’ve always followed my own advice. After delaying my writing career while my daughters were young, I found I’d lost much of my self-confidence. My writing always ended up last on my list of “to do’s”. Not by design but by accident, or so I thought – until I discovered why: If I finished, I had to put myself and my work out there. I stood a great chance of being rejected, which I was – a lot; and each rejection paralyzed me. That made me feel even more a loser, a failure.

Let me put in a good word for failure. For the chances are that whatever you end up doing, some day you’re going to fail – and pity you if you don’t. I’m not saying we always learn from our mistakes - maybe, maybe not – but failure helps us from becoming too arrogant, too prideful – that is, it should.

Yet there is that something wondrous in the human spirit that without much confidence or encouragement keeps us stubbornly persisting. Sometimes we pull up our socks and begin to try all over. Sometimes we pull up our socks and simply put one foot in front of the other in hope of better days. Back to Giacometti, we can learn to let the journey itself become the essential thing.

I may not always have liked the journey, but being a late bloomer has its own rewards. I feel I’m just beginning. And on this graduation day, this second time around with you – the class of 2006, that’s fun. It’s really fun! Call me doctor.

My fellow graduates ... your worlds especially are about to grow larger, freer and probably scarier. Options you haven’t yet imagined are waiting for you – as are terrible struggles. Life has a tricky way of blind-siding us. We have a tricky way of blind-siding ourselves. But where is it written that crust must ever form over our eyes? Where is it written that if one dream or effort fails, we can’t find another?

Right now most of you graduating are looking for that something marvelous. The world, quite literally, is at your fingertips. This is good. This can make you crazy.

TCU has given each of us a foundation. Let’s go out now and continue building on it. You are really special. You represent our hope.

We need your minds. Your curiosity. Your questions. Your gift of life. Your life force.

See you at our reunion. Thank you.”