Pollyanna, Call Your Office

This past week, a friend asked me, in one of those proverbial shuttle-ride-to-the-Quad conversations, if I knew what I was doing next year. Like many of my fellow seniors, I immediately wanted to change the subject, slap the person who asked or complain that I was still waiting to hear on different options. I started my usual whiny "Oh, I don't know" response and then stopped myself, saying with some surprise, "I'm not worried. All will work out. God will provide me with something useful to do that will make me happy, too!" I'm not sure whether the understandable surprise that registered on his face was due to the Pollyannaish statement I had just uttered or merely a mirror of my own surprise.

The peace I found in the utterance of these words is the simple one that I find every time I make a conscious decision to stop worrying about things utterly beyond my control, instead allowing them to grow and develop as they may. It's not complacency; instead it is faith. Cynics and pessimists see this trust--this faith--as the purview of the innocent and the naive.

Maybe it is some form of self-trickery, but I don't care; it makes me happy, allowing me to do everything else I need to do in the interim. This peace, I find, sometimes opens my eyes for the first time to the things that I miss in my worried hurrying. It leaves room in a day when I should be writing cover letters and finishing a thesis chapter to have a three-hour conversation in Lowell dining hall about my calling in life. Would I have been as open to that conversation itself or its contents had I been in my room printing out my resume?

I'm not advocating laziness or procrastination here, as I certainly have enough of each fault to share with several of you, nor am I saying that sitting back with a cup of coffee will get your thesis written. On the contrary, I am suggesting that everyone, especially seniors trying to figure out what to do with their lives in the next two weeks, take a few steps back, sit down, turn off your telephone, go for a long walk in a neighborhood where you won't bump into any fellow students, clear your mind and open your heart.

Most importantly, listen. The resources you need are there for you if you calm down and look for them. Next year does not have to be a consulting or investment banking job if you don't want it to be. Sit down with someone at the Office of Career Services. If he or she asks you what you want to do, what do you think you would be good at, all things being equal, can you answer them? Do you know? Have you really tried to dust out the cobwebs in your mental attic, to remember what drives you in the first place?

"Give me an example!" you say. A couple of weeks ago, around that little holiday that acutely reminds some of us--just in case we forgot--that we are single, my friends were plagued with a string of constant complaints that seemed to trip from my tongue as effortlessly as conversations about the weather. They got to hear all about how unhappy I was that this Valentine's Day would be so different from last year's, when I was in a "happy relationship." Never mind that I'm now more than happy with the way things turned out, I was only interested in whining about what I didn't have and what I had lost, how empty the day would be without a "significant other."

How wrong I was! Hearing a knock on my door, I peered out into the hallway, wondering where the knocker had gone. On the floor in front of my door was a small cloth-bound book. Inside were notes from most of my friends, letters of friendship and love, reminding me of all that I've been blessed with. They all told me to listen to my own advice, to wait, to wonder in all that I saw and to trust that in time God's plan for me would reveal itself.

They told me about love, about faith, about the glory of true friendship. I realized what great happiness I have been blessed with. It was truly the happiest Valentine's Day of my life. And it had been there all along. I had only to close my mouth and open my eyes.

My favorite author, C.S. Lewis, wrote a book entitled "The Four Loves" where he explains the four-tiered Greek definition of love, from storge (affection) to philia (friendship) to eros (love, can be sexual) and agape (loving friendship and sacrifice without limitation or prerequisite). Much like recruiting can make us forget what careers might make us truly happy, the search for eros can obscure the agape that many of us are already blessed with from from our friends and, if we're lucky, our family. Draw on this love of your friends and ask them to help you in your search. If it's more than a two-minute conversation, they may tell you things you haven't realized about yourself, things that will help you in your search. You may well be surprised what you find.

Christa M. Franklin '99 is a social studies concentrator in Currier House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.