Sit back, relax, enjoy the guacamole

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
[email protected]. Send general comments to
[email protected].