Jessica Lange, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress, delivered the 2008 commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College. Reflecting on what she would tell her twenty-two-year-old self, she said the most important lesson she'd failed to fully embrace when young was simply to be present. Life, she argued, is not governed by will or intention but is ultimately the collection of sense memories stored in our nerves — a certain slant of light on a winter's afternoon, the sound of spring peepers at twilight, a child's laughter, a mother's voice. 'Don't be absent from your own life,' she urged, noting that someday the smell of bread baking or the sound of a mockingbird will stop you in your tracks and carry you back to yourself.