Expecting the Unexpected

I am about to commit a Harvard heresy. Hold on to your hats. I don't have a job. I'm not going to be paid a lot of money to do anything; in fact, I'm not going to be paid anything to do nothing. I don't even really know where I want to live, what I want to do or how I'm going to do it.

I mentioned this to a friend here, and she told me, "You should say you're going to be a volunteer."

I'm not sure that's the way to go. In fact, I'm growing more and more comfortable with the idea that I am going to be unemployed come June 8. Of course, it's not like I'm going to be hitting the welfare line, or anything like that, but I have definitely come to terms with the fact that I just don't know what it is I want to do in the next year. In fact, I'd go so far as to recommend that more Harvard students contemplate their navels in this way.

We find ourselves more often than not propelled headlong in that single direction since the womb. Preschool, elementary school, high school, Harvard and a Big Life. Most of us had the goal of Harvard in mind in high school; many of us fought, tooth and nail, to make the grades so that we could get into Harvard Med. Others brushed up on case questions for months before that fateful interview for BCG. We think that we'll take a couple of years, make a slew of cash, and then sit back and do what we really wanted to do with our lives. Go sailing. Climb Kilimanjaro.

But I've recently become a devotee of the doctrine that says that the surest way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. Likewise, in an interesting corollary, life is what happens while you're making other plans. I won't claim to have invented either phrase, but I deeply believe that of all people in the world, Harvard seniors are most in need of this advice.

Think about it. We expect that the two years of high-caffeine, low-sleep, no-life, all-work lifestyle are somehow retrievable when we turn 28, and that waiting for us on the other end of the tunnel of investments and consulted companies will be a house, a car, the perfect\ loving spouse, two kids and all the fun we missed along the way. I am not condemning investment bankers or their work ethic. What I am advocating is a quick personal challenge to the way life has currently shaken out. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Find out. Are there any dreams you have that you haven't followed up on? Maybe you should.

This is not me trumpeting how right I am or how sorry you'll be. But look around. How many of our classmates have begun to realize that they're going to bail out of their job as soon as they can? How many are still looking for a job just because that's what they were supposed to do after graduating from Harvard?

I've had this terrible guilty feeling about not having a job when I graduate. So yes, I am still looking for a job as we speak. But I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to damn well enjoy whatever it is I finally settle on. The fact is this: Life is too short not to be enjoying what you're doing. Allow me to bust a little Landmarks of World Architecture on you. The Harvard Mentality suggests the Japanese aesthetic of a foreground, middle ground and background. But there is no transitory material between. We are forever imagining what that distant vista would be like to experience for ourselves, but we must focus on the here and now, and how that may be able to help us in the immediate future, forever deferring the mountain view for the shrubs we are perched among. We fail to see the chasm that divides us from those views. In other words, by focusing so harshly on the immediate future and dreaming vaguely of the future, we fail to recognize that we can't get there from here.

Be careful, friends. We are so used to following our plans that we don't quite realize what it is we've been doing until suddenly all those opportunities are gone. Did you justify your attendance here with the idea that you'd get out into the city? Now how many of you actually did? You might have planned it, but things you did got in the way.

So make your plans a bit shorter, so that you enjoy your trip to the mountains of your goals. You don't want have God laughing at you.

Paul S. Gutman '00, a government concentrator in Currier House, was sports photography associate of The Crimson in 1999.