Love the Questions

I have been caught in a dilemma these past months. A dilemma is something confounded and combustible, with passions and persuasions and hope and fear pushing against its solutions. Let me see if I can put my dilemma into words, for I believe it is a dilemma a great deal of Harvard students face.

Since last February, the Class of 2014 has been buzzing obsessively—about consulting and finance, about LSAT’s and MCAT’s and TFA, and about the great question mark that lies in the post-college world. I’ve let this incessant interplay get to me: I’ve absorbed resume vocabulary words and signed up for the On-Campus Interview email list, only to discover that I quite simply don’t know what I want to do. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, too few Harvard students admit to confusion and uncertainty about their future. So many want to know quickly what they will be doing. They want their future career to have the same reputable results as their college application process did.

One of the OCI representatives told me to think about where I’d like to be in 10 to 15 years and to see how people who are in those positions got there. Huh. Perhaps, I’d like to be an English teacher. I remember every English teacher who ever taught me. Five years later, I still remember Mrs. Klebba’s ability to pull meaning from literature, to compel me to learn more about Eliot or Keats, about the music of consonants and vowels and their implications.

I’d like to affect young people’s daily lives. I love building relationships. I think education is immensely important, and not just education in the classroom. I could see myself being the equivalent of a First-Year Outdoor Program leader my whole life. There are outdoor programs I’m looking into. One prominent program leader on campus told me that I should frame the future with, “What do I want to learn in the next few years?” He said I should take programs a few years at a time, and re-assess over those increments. By contrast, Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston suggested a different question in lecture for U.S. in the World 35. He suggested we ask, “What it is you wish to change in the world,” when looking for a career.

One of my past teaching fellows once spoke to me for two hours about my future. At the top of my paper, he wrote, “Love the questions. —Rilke.” This quote has become a mantra, as it has allowed me to redefine and re-center myself amid the multifaceted monsoon that is my senior year. As I write this, I realize how many incredible advisors I’ve had these past few years. And through them, I’ve determined that the real question we should be asking is more complicated and simple than all these career conundrums.

I must ask: Is it better to be preparing for where we want to be in ten years, or who we want to be in ten years?

Ideally, I want to choose jobs that alter my future in a loving kind of way. Nine times out of 10, I want the “who I am” to be improving, not “what I am.” I want to be set up with a good heart, not a good resume. What matters is how a career will affect me—who I will become two or three years out of a job. If I am bitter, sad, self-absorbed, or incapable of sustaining powerful relationships after my first few years in any career, then I will have made a choice for the worse. Perhaps I write in cliché, but perhaps again I need to remind myself what it means to live by this cliché.

Every month since sophomore year, I’ve given myself at least 10 minutes on the steps of Widener Library to think about my experience at Harvard. The Yard always holds a weight of indefinite sameness: The people coming in and out are different as the years pass, but the Yard always expands out as a plane of grass or snow, compacted against brick buildings and Memorial Church. It is always bustling, churning. Every year, bright toddlers kick about, to be watched with smiles by college students and professors. The leaves turn yellow, red, purple. They fall. Over and over and over again without concern—without desire. In these moments, I recall that each toddling toddler, each student, each friend has a voice and life as complex as my own, as irreplaceable and yet quickly replaced. Patterns inundate this world, but we must determine the patterns that define our lives.

Such contemplations bring me to this: I must continue searching. Not just for a job, but for the better version of myself that I glimpse in long conversations, on hikes, in car rides, with family, on paper. I can only embrace the unknown with the convoluted emotions that define all of life’s transitions. But throughout this, I will love the questions.

Elizabeth A. Holden ’14 is an English concentrator in Currier House.