Sit back, relax, enjoy the guacamole
Don’t sweat the big stuff, just take time to appreciate the little things life has to offer
As “super seniors” look forward to graduating next week, we’re forced to look back at the last four years and take stock of what happened.
Did we choose the right school? Did we take the right classes?
Did we really need to stay an extra quarter? (I prefer to think of it as a victory lap).
For those of us looking for some meaning from our UCLA careers I have only one word: guacamole.
It’s amazing that so much can be summed up in a deliciously hearty dip, even though its perfection is in its simplicity.
This secret was bestowed upon me by a very wise professor of mine in Kenya.
For the last 40 years that she’s been living in Africa, she’s been exposed to a veritable blitzkrieg of agents of virtue: development workers building new schools for Kenyan orphans or U.N. officials organizing refugee camps.
Each time she meets one, she faces the inevitable question – what do you do for a living?
The question is biting, because in Africa, every ex-pat is eagerly trying to one-up the next in their ceaseless barrage of good deeds.
“I’m a professor,” she replies proudly.
Then come the looks: The aid workers think they’ve won. Teaching? Research?
She’s lived in Kenya for the better part of her life and her contributions don’t even come close to their grandiose efforts to save humanity.
“Well that’s not all,” she squeezes in slyly. “I introduced guacamole to a village of Luo people of Western Kenya.”
The Luos had avocados, limes, tomatoes and onions before my professor came along, but she was the one to impart the gift of the miraculously tasty mixture.
The village has been hooked ever since, and my professor can go to sleep at night knowing she’s made the world a better, more dippable place.
This story illustrates one fundamental truth about life: It’s all about the little things.
It would be easy to look back at our careers here at UCLA and feel disappointed at how little we’ve actually achieved.
We still haven’t gotten rid of world hunger, the war in the Middle East or the overly zealous, combative religious guy on Bruin Walk.
Heck, we couldn’t even get an on-campus bar.
Clearly the world has a ways to go before it’s anything like the place we always hoped it would be back in elementary school or even freshman year.
But just because we haven’t cured AIDS or taken our tops off for Playboy doesn’t mean we haven’t done some amazing things.
It’s a hard pill to swallow at first, but it doesn’t need to be bad.
When you’re a kid, you think the greatest thing in the world would be to be president, or an astronaut or a movie star.
After watching “Indiana Jones” I wanted to be an archaeologist until I found out that few of them actually fight Nazis in the Jordanian desert, despite what the movie might suggest.
So we grow up and realize that being the president is the craziest job in the world, movie stars are too coked-out to have real emotions and nobody gives a hoot about astronauts anymore.
We come to realize that it’s not about the supposedly big things like where you’ll go or what you’ll do, but rather how you’ll get there.
Our experiences here at UCLA and beyond will be defined by the little things: the “hows,” not the “whats.”
In the end, it will be the relationships we have with each other, not with Murphy Hall, that will define our post-Bruin lives.
It will be the things we learn while managing our time and paying the bills, not while being in lecture, that make us into veritable mensches.
UCLA is more than just a means to an end; enjoy the journey and take pride in the little things, because I can tell you the end isn’t looking all that peachy anyway.
The degrees we earn will just be pieces of paper and the grades we get will never be anything but letters.
My advice to all us graduating seniors, and even those of you sticking around is: Don’t fret about the big things.
Sometimes in life we have to slow down, take a breath, look around and hope for guacamole.
Hungry? Why wait? Grab some guac and e-mail Levine at jlevine@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.
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