On Listlessness

My friends have started making lists. Not the usual late-October variety: buy Thanksgiving ticket home, start attending Lit and Arts B section, finally pick up course pack from Gnomon. No, these lists have more of a doomsday quality, a sense that they signify some clock ticking down to a college apocalypse—a clock that is just beginning to become audible. These lists have titles written in red, sometimes underlined twice. And rather than being creased and tucked into the back pocket of one’s blue jeans, they have made their way to the marquis of college dorm rooms—front doors, common room walls, magnetized refrigerator sides. Their headings read “To Do Before Graduation” or “Top Ten Must Sees” and are followed by a list of activities so thorough, so positively guide-booky, that they would make any Fodor’s writer proud: picnic on Boston Common, visit Walden Pond, walk the Freedom Trail, take a Duck Tour, inhale culture at the MFA.

My friends are not unique in their behavior. They follow in the footsteps of a long line of seniors who have sensed the impending end of their college careers, felt a twinge of remorse at time wasted, and decided that they must carefully plot every moment of the next eight months if they are not to walk out in cap and gown turning around to see what they should have done. Unfailingly, there is a columnist every year that decides to jump on the bandwagon, to uproot a scribbled to-do list from his bulletin board and replant it on the editorial page of The Crimson, transformed into a 750-word published ultimatum of things that must be accomplished before one can graduate Harvard with a clear conscience/ peaceful spirit/ understanding of the importance of the world outside Johnston Gate. I will not follow suit. I will not provide my top picks. I will not implore students to leave their dorm rooms and hit the streets. In fact, I will not be making any lists at all.

I do not mean to imply that the activities now carefully enumerated on so many hallowed sheets of paper are insignificant, that the sites carefully marked on maps are not worth seeing. Indeed, my fellow students have done a remarkably thorough job of teasing out the centers and squares, the parks and plazas, the quirks and quaint spots that differentiate Boston from all other cities. Instead I offer the humble suggestion that perhaps we ought not be preoccupied with checking off every listing in the Unofficial Guide. Perhaps we are not responsible for seeing what makes Boston unique, but instead are responsible for making our experiences unique on our own.

I will admit that I have never been in a swan boat, never climbed to the top of the Prudential Center, never peered intently at the water that a few fiery revolutionaries once turned into tea. But I have visited China Town in wind so bitter that my hot and sour soup froze as I stepped out the door. I have driven to the Cape and back in one night just to eat ice cream before the parlors boarded their windows for the first frost. I’ve made snow angels in front of Faneuil Hall, made canolis in the North End, made wishes in park fountains just before dark. I have made memories in this city on my own time and in my own way without regard to whether I have seen or done what the Best of Boston dutifully advises.

The danger I see in making lists is that we lose our spontaneity, that we focus too intently on well-formed plans and thereby miss the opportunities that never could have been anticipated—the detour down the side street in Porter Square, the directionless walk that leads to unseen vistas, the thrill of surfacing at the least familiar T stop just to see what’s there. By focusing on what we ought to do, we allow tradition to dictate what should give our college experience meaning instead of setting out to inhere meaning on our own. We underestimate the significance of life’s little idiosyncrasies. We ignore the beauty of the mundane. And, inevitably, we come to the end of our journey feeling unfulfilled because no amount of time is ever sufficient to live the guidebook fantasy and to make our own.

Thus, while some of my classmates will continue listing, I prefer to continue living. For my part, I’ll make my lists when I’m done.

Lauren E. Baer ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.