There’s a quotation that I almost used in the Harry Potter book. “In magic, man has
to rely on himself.” But that’s the perennial appeal of magic, the idea that we ourselves,
have power and we can shape our world. I came from a place where I was with a, I was a single
mother and it really was hand to mouth at one point. It was as literally as poor as
you can get in Britain without being homeless at one point. If you’ve ever been there,
you will never ever take for granted that you don’t need to worry. Never. I had a
very very tiny baby, and then I walked straight into poverty and depression. Clinical depression,
is a terrible place to be because it’s not sadness. Sadness is not a bad thing. You know,
to cry and to feel, but it’s that cold absence of feeling. It’s even the absence of hope
that you can feel better. That really hollowed out feeling, that’s what the dementors are.
Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations
and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which
to pride yourself. But poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself
at your age was not poverty but failure. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes
failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I
think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere 7 years after my graduation
day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short lived marriage had imploded, and I was
jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without
being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself,
had both come to pass. And by every usual standard I was the biggest failure I knew.
I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended and for a long time any light at the end of
it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply
because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself
that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy, into finishing
the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else I might never have
found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.
I was set free. Because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and
I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And
so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail
on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without
failing at something, unless you’ve lived so cautiously, that you might as well not
have lived at all, in which case, you’ve failed by default. So given a time turner,
I would tell my 21 year old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not
a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your
life. Though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life
is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone’s total control. And the humility to know that
will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. Unlike any other creature on this planet,
human beings can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves
into other people’s places. Written by the greek author Plutarch, “what we achieve
inwardly will change outer reality.” That is an astonishing statement and yet proven
a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses in part our inescapable connection
with the outside world. The fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you likely to touch other people’s lives? We do not need magic
to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have
the power to imagine better. In the first Harry Potter book, Dumbledore says to Harry
“the happiest man alive would look in the mirror and see himself exactly as he is”.
So I would have to say that I’m pretty close. As is a tale, so is life. Not how long it
is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.