It wasn’t exactly a demand, but somehow or other it was a looming, challenging, and frequent question in my life during my early teen years.
The pressure came from school related decisions, especially in high school. The question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, sometimes influenced a choice of classes and very much influenced a choice about continuing education. To go to college or not, and, if going, to what college and for what course of study.
My father was a self-made businessman. Although very smart, he quit high school to go to work. He had a personal goal: not to be poor anymore, to make money!
Years later (when I was a boy) he started his own manufacturing business, a small knitting mill, and headed it until he retired.
I guess it baffled him a bit that his son had no such clear ambitions. He sometimes asked me about what I’d like to do when I was grown up, but I never had an answer. I did know, however, that I wasn’t attracted by the interest in business my father had.
His sister was executive secretary at a nearby home for children, and she suggested that it might be helpful for me to meet with the school counselor (psychologist) for some aptitude and vocational interest testing.
He met with me a few times when I was in high school, giving me a battery of tests that included IQ (147) and suggested that I seemed drawn to helping professions (for instance, undertaker!).
I really remember my last visit when a fire broke out; we hastily exited the building, and we saw the upper floors burning away before the fire could be controlled!
It seemed clear that I was going to go to college, the first in my extended family to do so. But what and where?
I liked science, and in those early post-World War II days, the latest topic seemed to be nuclear physics—that was a thread of direction for me.
Another question was size. My high school Latin teacher, a graduate of Amherst College, persuaded me of the advantages of a smaller college like Amherst over a large university.
Also, Amherst had a collaborative program with Massachusetts Institute of Technology: after two successful years at Amherst and three at M.I.T., a student could get a B.A. from Amherst and a B.S. from M.I.T..
I had applied for admission to both Harvard and Amherst; happily, both accepted me, and my decision was to go to Amherst.
Little did I know then the consequences of that decision, that turning point in my life’s road, and how the impact of those first years at Amherst finally led me to the beginnings of an answer to the lingering question about the direction of my life and my future.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a sudden awakening, a clear and obvious direction. Actually it was more like a growing temptation that had to be resisted and controlled.
It wasn’t a career path that was clear to me nor was it very attractive. It wasn’t a positive result of my college formation or positively encouraged by my college classes. However, it was a consequence of my college experience.
It really wasn’t exactly an answer to the question that had been tormenting me, what do I want to do? Yet, in a way it was an answer. I came to realize that the beginnings of an answer involved recasting the question. The better question was, what does God want me to do?
What did I want to do? I wanted to do what God wanted me to do. Now, the challenge of my life became finding an answer to that new question. Does God ask something of me, and, if so, what?
6 November 2021