Laughing When We Can: Life Without a Plan

When I got to the University of Rochester in July of 2015 to take what was supposed to be a one-year gig as interim director of Hillel, the first thing I did was reach out to the student president. Rebecca was a senior and had grown up in Rochester. Unlike most U of R students, she was there year-round. We met for coffee and a muffin in College Town. I liked her instantly. She was warm, friendly, intelligent, and had an unruly, brown mop of Jewfro framing a face set with laughing green eyes.

The thing that struck me about Rebecca was her clear sense of direction about, well, everything. She had decided in elementary school that she wanted to be a doctor who delivered babies and had stayed true to that goal. She entered U of R essentially pre-admitted to the medical school. She graduated in December of 2015 and after working with me at Hillel for one semester, I tried to get her to abandon the med school nonsense and make a career in Jewish communal service. She was intrigued and made a show of considering but that was not in her plan.

It's the exact opposite of how I’ve lived my life.

Growing up, I never had more than the vaguest notion of how I wanted to use my life. I remember when I was in elementary school asking my mother what would happen when I was finished with elementary school. She explained that I would go to junior high school. This would be followed by high school.

“And then?,” I wondered.

“Then college,” she said.

“And then?”

“Then you get a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“Whatever you want.”

I couldn’t imagine a job that I would want except maybe astronaut.

I went to high school. It was a city magnet school that focused on engineering. The experience was such that I knew quickly that I didn’t want to be an engineer. The classes I liked best were English, Chemistry, and a little mini-class in computer programing. My high school had a big ol’ IBM mainframe in an air-conditioned room that could be fed Fortran programs with stacks of punch cards, one card for each line of program. I loved writing programs for that beast and I loved the sound the card reader made as the programs fed in. I gained some small degree of respect from my classmates who discovered that I could spot quickly errors in their programs. I wasn’t great at physics and worse at math. So much for becoming an astronaut. I don’t think it occurred to me that computer programmer might be a job.

I decided on a college because the father of my best friend across the street said I should go there. He was a Quaker and suggested Guilford, a small Quaker college in Greensboro, N.C. I received little guidance from my own parents, whose main criteria was that I go somewhere inexpensive. At $4,500 per year room, board, and tuition, Guilford wasn’t exactly cheap (in 1979) but it wasn’t crazy expensive either. I took an overnight bus to Greensboro on my own and looked around. It seemed pleasant enough, and more importantly they accepted me with my mediocre high school grades.

It turned out to be a great choice or maybe just lucky chance. At Guilford I studied English lit because I liked to read novels and found it easy to write papers about them. It was clearly a path of least resistance. I had no idea what one would do with a degree in English lit besides teach and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. What I did want to do, I had no idea. I did two semesters abroad, one in Munich and the other in London. The opportunity came along, and the cost was about the same as being in Greensboro – why not? They were two of the best semesters I spent in college, indeed some of the most memorable months of my life. I also met the person I would marry at Guilford during the one semester that we both attended.

I had a vague idea of the things I wanted when I graduated. They were pretty unimaginative. Get married, (in the unlikely event I could find someone willing to marry me), have children, find tolerable work, obtain health insurance, retire someday. But I had no idea or plan how these things might come about. It all seemed so intangible. I don’t remember being anxious about it though. Somehow I felt the universe would look after me. Somehow it would all work out.

After college I found myself in Arlington, Va. outside D.C. where my mom lived. With no skills and no real goals or ambition, I found myself waiting tables at bad Italian restaurant run by an Iranian immigrant family. In my free time (there was a lot of it, I worked lunches only) I volunteered at National Public Radio answering requests from listeners for recordings of program snippets that they had heard and wanted to hear again. I would find the segment, make a cassette tape and put it in the mail. This led to my first “real” job.

Thanks to my girlfriend Barbara who spotted an ad, I got hired to work for a company that had contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services to run health information clearinghouses for the federal government. These clearinghouses were how people got information in the dark time before the internet.

I worked on a program called the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Clearinghouse. I was the project assistant. I was hired to answer the phone, open the mail, and send information to those requesting it. It was much like my volunteer work at NPR. A week or two after I started, the project manager quit. By the time the new project manager started a month later, I had picked off all the parts of her job that looked more interesting than my job and started doing them, leaving the boring bits for my new boss.

This became my modis operandi for the rest of my career. Do things that seemed interesting whether they were my job or not and offload the boring bits to someone else when possible. I am not saying this was the right thing to do, it is, however, what I did. For some reason my bosses almost never objected.

I became the editor of the monthly newsletter and proficient in the database program that ran our information response system. I even learned enough of the programming language to be able to fix minor bugs. I obtained the administrator password by looking over the shoulder of our “information services manager” as she typed it in. I still remember it: Daytona. This gave me full access to every part of the system. She never found out that I knew it.

I quit that job in February of 1986 so that Barbara and I could travel the world. We each threw $5,000 of hard-earned savings in the kitty and set off with backpacks and a tent to travel until the money ran out, which it did 16 months later in Thailand.

We spent our last few dollars to get home and put down a deposit on an apartment and I again went looking for a job. Thanks to Barbara who spotted an ad, I got, a position as a research assistant at an organization called the Public Risk Management Association (PRIMA). I didn’t know what risk management was, or what an association was for that matter, but I proceeded to unconsciously pursue the same career strategy at PRIMA that I had employed previously: I tried to take on the things I found interesting and to ignore or offload the things I didn’t. I became the bookkeeper and I taught myself accounting. Then bookkeeping became repetitive so I convinced the director to hire another bookkeeper and make me the finance director. When the director left and the assistant director became the executive director, he made me the assistant director. Two years later, four years after I started as research assistant, I was the executive director.

In 1998, I quit my job again to go to graduate school. I only knew that I wanted to pursue my Jewish journey by working for a Jewish organization. I had no idea what that would be. While I was in school, my now wife Barbara spotted an ad for a job at the Hillel International Center. Money was running short. I applied for and was offered the job. I worked there for 14 years. I was hired for one thing but ended up doing many others (see MO above).

I retired in 2020 at age 58 and was quite content to spend the next few years reading, writing, walking and, once Barbara retired, traveling. Then in February of this year, my friend David called me and asked if I’d be interested in being the finance manager of his nonprofit start up. I thought about it for 7 seconds and then said, “Sure, sounds fun!”

And this has been my career, indeed my life. I can’t say that things didn’t turn out as I expected because I didn’t really expect anything. In my career, if you want to call it that, I pursued the things that interested me. I never worried much about salary or advancement. In my entire career I never negotiated or asked for a raise. It was a textbook case of how not to manage a career, of how not to get ahead.

And yet…

I always made a living, a decent living. And, I realize now, just as important, my work always met three criteria.

1. It was interesting. Most days I went to work there was something to learn, something for my curiosity to pursue, and problems I enjoyed trying to solve. I always remained slightly incredulous that I was being paid for what I was doing.

2. I loved the people I worked with. I mean that very literally, I found I came to care about the people I worked with like family. Also, like family, they could be irritating, occasionally infuriating but I loved them, nonetheless. Most of them anyway.

3. I saw my work as meaningful and believed that it was in some small way making the world a better place. Whether being a supportive voice on the other end of a phone line for a parent who had lost a child to SIDS, providing resources to those working to ensure public safety, or serving up a home cooked meal to students away from home, my work always felt like more than just a paycheck or a way to make someone else rich. I was very lucky there.

I used to wish that my parents had given me more direction. Suggested a college, or a career, given me a Jewish education or just a stronger sense of identity or destiny. But now I see that my folks like Forrest Gump’s mama had it right when they said effectively, “Y’gonna have to figure that out for yourself.”

I read somewhere this week that you only see the hand of God when you look back. I understood that to mean that the trajectory of your life only makes sense in retrospect. But I still envy those who have always known what they were meant to do, those who made a plan and stuck to it until realized.

Rebecca began medical school at the University of Rochester in the fall of 2016. Today she is a doctor, an OB/GYN at a clinic here in D.C. It’s all working out according to her plan.

Still, for me, having no plan also worked out. I followed my curiosity and always found interesting work. I accepted whatever I was paid and just made sure that I spent less than that. If I was offered a promotion, I took it.

I married my best friend. Two beautiful children appeared and grew into kind-hearted adults. It was a lot more luck and chance than anything. Certainly, nothing I deserved.

There is much wisdom in the Yiddish saying, “Humans plan, God laughs.” It suggests that it may be best not to plan too much. Maybe we should leave the planning to God while we do the laughing —when we can.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.