Around this time last February, my eyes sprung open as the morning light flooded my 10 ft. x 10 ft. dorm room. Icy wind chilled the side of my body through the window I intentionally placed next to the head of my bed and cracked open as far as dorm regulations would allow. I hated shades, I hated stuffy air, and I loved the daily invasion of sunlight and winter breeze preceding my morning alarm each day. But this morning, another sound woke me up—not the sunlight, cold draft, or ring of my iPhone alarm. It was my dad’s voice.
I thought I was dreaming. My dad lives 3,000 miles away in California, and I had not heard or expected any visit from him. I refused to get out of bed and shut my eyes to force myself back to sleep. Not long after, a collection of male voices—two I could distinguish—were quietly muffled behind my bedroom door. Still, my lack of interest failed to motivate me to get out of bed and see what the commotion was about. When I opened my eyes for the second time, my older brother was smiling down at me.
“Surprise!” he whispered. My dad was standing behind him with a grin matching his son’s.
My furrowed brows and half-smile exhibited my confusion enough to initiate an explanation from the two of them. Jake had just returned from Peru and was moving to New York City, so my dad flew in to help move him in. The logistics made no sense in my head since my brother could have easily flown into New York instead of Boston, and my mom typically enjoyed decorating and organizing our move-ins, but I chose to not ask any questions. He told me he would take the two of us to breakfast.
On our sunny walk to Flour Bakery, Jake recounted his experiences traveling through South America: going on solo visits to different beaches and cities and experiencing the culture of our mom’s Peruvian heritage. When his soliloquy faded, my dad cleared his throat.
“So, guys, your mom has—um—throat cancer,” he croaked. “It’s stage three, but…she’s had it since November, and—and everything should be okay. She’s going through treatment now.”
The only response he got was the sounds of our boots crushing salt and snow. My stomach dropped.
Since November? November? It was February then, so she had been fighting cancer without us knowing for four months, of which I’d been home with her for only three days. For Thanksgiving, my parents encouraged my brother and me to stay on the East Coast. I did not question it and enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with a good friend in Connecticut. For Christmas, my brother was in Peru, and I opted to only go back home for three days. I was taking the LSAT that January and wanted as few distractions as possible while studying for the test. I flew from California to Cambridge on Christmas Day and spent all of January in Widener stacks studying for a test I would ultimately fail. Maybe not actually fail, but enough so that I’d have to both re-study and retake it.
But I did not know my test score until later that same day I received news of my mother’s illness, when I got the dreaded “LSAT Scores are now available” email. Until then, my justification for spending the entirety of winter break alone in my dorm room in snowy Cambridge, while I had my childhood bedroom and a warm and welcoming home on the beach in California waiting for me, was the toxic notion of opportunity cost that I believed I was wasting if I took any time off.
Little did I know that my mother was struggling with cancer all that time. That her consistent coughing during our phone calls was not just a “cold” she was getting over like she repeatedly assured me it was. That she was traveling an hour each day to UCLA to receive treatment, and that radiation and chemotherapy would soon leave her skinny, with damaged hair, and no voice. Caught up in my schoolwork, I had no way to recognize it and no way to know.
Even if I am missing out on a fun winter break, I thought to myself, it will all be worth it when I get a good LSAT score. Spoiler alert: it was not.
Yet the absurdity of my willingness to sacrifice time with friends and family in the pursuit of a good test score did not strike me until this winter break when I actively vowed not to touch, think, or even feel the slightest guilt in staying away from any school or work-related obligations. I read pleasure books, went to church, oil painted, played tennis, spent more time at the beach than I did indoors, and said yes to every opportunity and invitation to travel, meet new people, and be with those that I love.
This shift in perspective was an exercise I had to actively force myself to practice. I found myself daily voicing the shame I felt neglecting my thesis, grad school applications, apartment hunting, or anything else on my list of to-do’s that would ultimately find their way into my life. And I strongly believe that the majority of Harvard students would have felt the same.
They teach us many things at Harvard. They teach us how to contextualize the morals in novels, how to structure organic chemistry reactions, how to build financial models, how to interview, and how to network. They teach us a lot about that.
But they don’t teach us about the brevity of life. They don’t teach us what to do when you’re told your mom has cancer, or how quickly life can change before you know it. They don’t teach us how to enjoy the mundanity of simply existing with others or how therapeutic hobbies truly can be. They don’t teach us how to love doing nothing.
It’s not Harvard’s responsibility to teach us these things, nor is it anyone’s responsibility to stop us from our tendency to weigh the opportunity costs of every single minute of our lives, comparing what we’re doing with what we could be doing and how this decision will impact our future. While Harvard students are all gifted with different talents and skills, our one unifying factor is the commitment we once made to our future: a commitment we are all likely still in pursuit of.
But I do believe that it is our responsibility—including one I am actively keeping myself accountable for—to not forget about the fundamental qualities that make us human. We are incredibly capable of doing and achieving so many things, filling our Google Calendars and coffee dates to maximize both productivity and experience. Yet we are less capable of pursuing—and much less enjoying—something that ironically should take considerably less effort: doing nothing. Instead, I advocate for a more intentional emphasis on downtime, appreciating rest enough to balance our ambitions with tranquility.
Marbella Marlo ’24 (mmarlo@college.harvard.edu)’s mom is healthy now and reading this article from 70° California sunshine.