一心一意

An idiom in Chinese goes, “one heart, one mind” — meaning wholehearted dedication and single-minded focus. Heart and mind aligning in perfect unison. 

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When I was eight, my ironclad dream was to become a children’s book author. I filled hundreds of pages in ratty spiral notebooks with fantastical chapters chronicling the life of a heroic eagle warrior, orphaned at birth but mentored by a wise owl to save the bird kingdom from evil. I thought it was the best story in the world.

What ever happened to that story? And what about that dream?

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Stanford has been a nonlinear journey to say the least. A journey that is unimaginable to the embarker, beyond the wonder of dreams. It’s a journey that took me through classes across a dozen departments. A journey through blue books and problem sets, peer critiques and papers. A journey from every corner of campus into the corners of the world.

A journey that took me into the heart of student activism, spending dozens of hours each week White Plaza throughout my sophomore year. That brought me into the Bridge one night at 1 a.m. my junior winter, turning around a story that same day to keep the peer counseling service alive for the coming years. That found me at a makeshift desk at 9 p.m. in a tiny East Village shoebox apartment teaching journalism workshops over Zoom for the Daily’s Summer High School program my sophomore summer. That brought me to a rural farm in The Bahamas my junior spring, constructing a solar-powered water pump. That led my freshman year roommate and I to start a longitudinal experiment giving dumb phones to 100 Stanford students that eventually led us to present an award-winning paper in Barcelona this spring. Where I discovered my niche passions in the critical mineral supply chain, working on projects in Chile and the DRC, traveling to the copper mines of Montana sophomore fall and the uranium mines of Kazakhstan this summer. 

It seems I’ve lived many little lives at Stanford, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like quite enough. It really is rather difficult to strike that balance, it proves, between quenching curiosities and achieving a sense of mastery. 

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Before the addition of its rather pejorative sidekick — “master of none” — the jack of all trades was a title of admiration, Dabbling in various talents was once a celebrated attribute, rather than decrying a lack of expertise. Only in pursuit of specialization during the Industrial Revolution did the generalist name sour. 

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“How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” 

A question Taylor Swift posed almost 15 years ago, and one that I reiterate to myself now on the brink of graduation. 

By the nature of higher education admissions, high schoolers far and wide are encouraged to call themselves a master of one. A coveted spike, you could call it, a key to a university. I was more of a master, of the realm I knew of the world, back then than I am now. Certainly, I “know” more in some aspects: more econometrics and theory, more analyses and syntheses, more about energy sources and electricity markets. But at the same time, I know more of my own limits, and the sheer expanse of what more there is to know.

The more Stanford showed me of the world, the less of it I could say I knew.

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“Un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé… mais abandonné.”

A work is never finished… but abandoned. A struggle captured originally by French writer Paul Valéry, between perfectionism and creation. When to stop refining, when to move on?

I should know this well, from all the stacks of ratty spiral-bound notebooks in my childhood closet. I should know, from all the Untitled documents that exist in some ether. I should know, from the worn away letters on my keyboard and the pencil-shaped groove on my right middle finger. 

I still have the eagle story. I do still want to write.

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Some nights in this ultimate year I felt that many strands in my journey here were incomplete. I hate to live with regrets, but oft wondered why I’d shot myself in the foot so many times, committing in so many directions and spreading myself across passions. 

There are arguably many ways I could’ve done Stanford “better.”

If I burrow down that rabbithole, I can picture them all, like the p-sets I should’ve started earlier, the programs I should’ve applied to, the emails I should’ve sent, and the events I should’ve attended. But there are also the more fork-in-the-road choices I made. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken on a secondary major, rather just focusing on one field. Maybe I should’ve stayed longer in a single club’s leadership, rather than turning to the next interest. Inevitably, I couldn’t give everything to everyone.

Stanford has been a tale of ambition and its repercussions, of discovering limits and what lies beyond them, of both falling short and overshooting. 

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三心二意

There is another idiom in Chinese: “three hearts, two minds.” You are at a fork in the road, but the fork has numerous tines and you don’t know where you’re going, anyway. And maybe, you want to turn back. 

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Is it okay to not tie everything up in a perfect bow, seamlessly gift wrapped? Is it okay to set down paths just to turn around, again and again? Is it okay to clear the name of the jack? Is it okay to have three hearts and not one? 

—-

Though the mammalian realm exists universally on one heart and one brain, the world contains biologies both wonderful and unimaginably diverse. 

The octopus, for one, is a creature of three hearts and even more brains.  Rather than following a straight, strictly programmed route through its world, the octopus continuously evaluates its environment, weighing prizes against traps with unparalleled adaptability.

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It’s coming up on 11:59 p.m. at Stanford, when it’s time to look back over all the pages that have been written and all that could have been. There is enough time to nix the squiggly red underlines, but not nearly enough to rewrite the paragraphs. At the deadline, it’s time to let go.

The beautiful thing about it, though, is that letting go of some strands tightens the grip on others. What is already in the books settles: the freshman dorm Zipcar trips to Half Moon Bay, the lazy weekend brunches around those perpetually sticky wooden tables, the late nights in the second food of the Daily House my first two years that eventually became nights in the kitchen of Hammarskjod House my latter two years.

Like all the other stories, perhaps Stanford will remain one unfinished. A cast of jacks and masters alike, a moral to embrace the follies of curiosity and the rewards of risk altogether. A draft to let go of, an ending that frees the hearts.