"We know now that feeling disconnected from others has significant deleterious effects on an individual's health and well-being. If you can help one person feel slightly more connected and loved, you've done a very very very good thing."
- Ajay Zutshi, Harvard Class of '93, via Facebook post
Connection, family, shared vulnerability, love. The words call to mind a therapist's office, not an Ivy League Institution. Let me explain a bit through the lens of our 25th reunion which occurred this past weekend in Cambridge.
I went to Harvard for several reasons: I thought I was smart, it was "the best," I could swim on the team, and New England was, I thought, home. My family lived in tiny Medfield, Massachusetts, for three years when I was between eighth and eleventh grades. My early adolescence was shaped by joyrides on narrow, tree-lined roads (listening to Genesis), homemade applesauce, thick Boston accents, and bundled-up football games under brilliant foliage. Home.
But it's not home if your family isn't there, as I discovered when Mom and Dad left me in that Radcliffe courtyard fall of 1989 and flew back to my siblings in southern California. Dreary doesn't begin to describe that fall's weather, and cinderblock walls aren't cozy. I was miserable freshman year, unable to admit my homesickness, my fears of inadequacy, my dread of going to eat in the huge freshman dining hall where I knew not a soul. I cried in the showers, skipped meals, and tried desperately to look like I fit in. All my classmates looked focused, intent, content as they strode purposefully through the Yard on the way to class.
With the spring thaw, I finally let a few people in: my friend Kristin, my future roommates Laura, Tara and Stacy. Laura connected three of us in the rooming lottery, and I saw a crack of daylight in my future, the possibility that I would actually come back for sophomore year.
Despite my self-absorption and immaturity, my desperate attempts to look like I had it together, I was able to ask for help from this group of caring people, and they gave support and shared their vulnerabilities in return. We created a small family of our own in Quincy House and shared many excellent adventures over the next three years.
When I saw my roommates last weekend at our Reunion, the joy and gratitude that filled me threatened to spill out the floodgates (especially after four gin and tonics). I recognized the tones of Stacy's voice, her gestures and laughter, though I hadn't seen her for sixteen years. Tara still fills the trashcan with tissues due to allergies, though it's in her lovely Wellesley home now and not a dorm room. Laura is still the amazing scholar/ athlete - and down-to-earth friend - that she was when she united us all. And then we saw Tim, Ernie, Jorge, Mike, Juan, Eliza, and all the Quincy House friends that taught me how to reconnect. My heart was full.
For me, the seeds of my best learning at Harvard were planted in my heart and not my head. It took decades for these to grow into small trees of knowledge, for me to recognize the true gifts in any phase of life - connection, family, shared vulnerability. How astonishing that in many discussions at Reunion we could instantly bond over freshman year traumas, our past desires to leave the school, our qualms about swim team weigh-ins and tapers. So many of us have learned those lessons about connection, and twenty-five years of life have unlocked our pride-bound recollections and allowed us to reach out.
Though it took me decades to "get it," those lessons have become my lifelong primer. When we left for Boston, our children were technically on their own, but our "family" in Colorado - our friends and neighbors here in Willow Creek - took care of their baseball games and sleepovers, their nighttime needs and their concerns. We wouldn't have made it to Boston without them, wouldn't have made it through the past fourteen years. Leaving and returning both filled with gratitude, laughing at the reasons I had for going to Harvard and at the joys that fill me now, twenty-five years later, at the lessons I learned.
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