As far as dirty little secrets go, mine is tame, lame and sadly well-known: My favorite movie is The Sound of Music. I know. But trust me, I didn’t open myself up to Google-able humiliation for the hell of it.
The reasons were simple in 1990: pretty dresses, pretty mountains and, even then, I wished I could sing (plus, the Captain is not a bad introduction to tall, dark, and handsome). When I got older, I halfheartedly defended the movie’s main themes, which are (I swear) universal: Love your family, love your country, be who you are and stand up for what you believe in.
But there’s another, more important current illustrated by one scene: When the Captain and Maria meet in the gazebo before deciding to marry, Maria quotes the Mother Abbess, saying, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.”
If I retain anything that I’ve learned here, I hope it’s remembering to seek out the windows. My baseline personality tends to compulsively, reflexively, try to kick down doors (obstacles in the way of The Plan) and ignore windows (those sideways opportunities that sometime seem like a distraction).
In high school, I accomplished, often through sheer force of will. I strove for, if not perfection, the appearance of it. It was a basic defense mechanism: If I wrote the blueprint and stuck to the plan, then I’d be happy and successful. Whether you admit it or not, you probably exhibit/suppress similar tendencies.
So much of life, especially here, is about staying ahead of the curve. Maintaining a competitive edge — for class, for grad school, for the career, for the benchmarks of life — is essential, and the very suggestion that we’re behind schedule can make most a little cray-cray. We’re successful people chasing increasingly narrowing definitions of success. An advantage, we trick ourselves into thinking, is in planning early and often so we get there first. So I had ridiculous plans.
And that’s why the windows matter. Somehow, in the most competitive place I’ve ever been and working in an organization where people race against deadline daily (in a building without any windows), I quit planning and started enjoying myself.
It was eventually empowering but slow coming — freshman year I simply tweaked my plans, sophomore year shattered most of those tweaks, junior year I worried/stressed, but senior year I finally relaxed. Now I realize just how much rested upon a combination of luck and faith.
I came to Penn even though I’d never officially toured the campus. I went to the intro meeting at The Daily Pennsylvanian for no particular reason, and believed twice that really, I was through at the paper. On a whim, I spent a summer nannying in Germany when my original plans didn’t work out; I spent a summer at home for basically the same reasons. My non-DP friends stem largely from a fluke seating arrangement in Houston during a not-great week. Most of my DP friendships were forged during my second phase at the paper. My second major actually started with a class that filled a requirement. The sum total of all these things meant a fabulous, fulfilling, last year.
So mostly that leaves me feeling grateful — to my parents, my sister, my professors, my homies, the Clean Basement, the 123, the 125 — to everyone who, for better or for worse, changed my plans, and changed me. My future is probably a lot less defined because of you, and there simply aren’t enough ways to say “thank you” for helping me appreciate these windows. Alyssa Schwenk is a College senior from Ottumwa, Iowa. She is the former editorial page editor and copy editor of the DP. Her e-mail address is schwenk@dailypennsylvanian.com. Alyssa will be working for Teach for America in Washington, D.C.
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