BYOD: Bring Your Own Doubts
I've re-started the Zooms, but 1:1. I realized I wanted more conversations—not more meetings.
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At this very moment, some of my favorite people in the world are converging on Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard’s Class of 1991—my class—is gathering for our 35th reunion.
At our 5th reunion, I remember seeing the tent for the 35th: GOD those people look OLD. But while the 5th (our first reunion since graduation) felt a bit like the bathing suit portion of a beauty pageant—everyone holding it in, beaming unsustainable confidence—I had to admit: the 35th looked like a hoot. Harvard people are almost all weird in one way or another, and from what I could see under that tent—the dancing alone?!—these alums had come to embrace that, and each other.
Even though I’ve lived far from the East Coast for many years, I’ve always made an effort to attend my college reunions—not because those were all halcyon days (trust me, I know all the best places to cry at Harvard), but because some of the conversations I’ve had there are the sorts of conversations I love most: long, honest, winding, dorky, exploratory, playful, earnest.
In addition to the handful of lifelong friends I made in my student days ::looks up to wave at them, much like a first grader at a recital::, reunions have magically produced new friends whom I somehow missed the first time around. At our 25th, for example, eight full years after moving to Bainbridge Island, I met two Seattle-area women whom I didn’t know at all in college. We live scattered around the region, but for a decade now we've gathered every couple of months, and now I’m not entirely sure how I survived so long without them.
This year, the scheduling gods have conspired to make a cross-country trip impossible. That said, I think it’s no coincidence that this past week I had four (?!) hours of what I’ve come to call “Grappling Zooms”—1:1 calls with some of you that remind me of my favorite conversations with classmates.
These calls, complete with faces and voices, are so different from “talking” on social media, which (unless this counts as social media?) I have largely left. They’re private, for one thing, and the aim, from what I’ve experienced, is less to project or persuade and more to think out loud in the company of another human being:What is happening? What now?
I love these conversations, and I hope more of you will connect with me in this way. The world is so full of bluster and certainty. I find it incredibly alienating. So, BYOD—bring your own doubts—and let’s do what the luckiest students have been doing since the beginning of time: finding their way in good company.
