Until my first year at Stanford, summer meant months of me lounging around at home, painting, reading and mindlessly surfing the Internet. On occasion, I would make the arduous 15-minute trip out to a friend’s, where we might eat junk food and watch movies. Even more rarely, there would be an event, some lazy afternoon I would wear crazy sunhats and explore cafes or old antique shops. I would end in the evening, drinking tea and eating scones, sprawled out on cushions, Cleopatra-esque.
People here, though, seem to achieve so much more in the limited span of three months. Their CVs bulge with accomplishment. So many of my friends have back-to-back schedules, some pioneering crazy inventions in labs, others training to run full marathons or climb K-2. Others are about to embark on a multitude of programs, running them or taking part in them. Regardless of what we Stanford students do, our summers all seem to result in very large, landmark feats that pile atop one another.

I love all this activity. Personally, it means that something interesting is always going on; when my life is boring, there is always an opportunity to live vicariously through somebody else. I wonder, though, if lazy days have really been left behind with the advent of Stanford, and if lazy days are necessarily any worse than hours occupied by overachievement.

I say this with a bit of nostalgia, because one of my laziest, most unproductive summers–the summer of 2009–was also one that I loved the most. In lieu of doing anything bombastic, I decided to languish on the European continent on an income that I alone had made over the previous school year. This meant three months of living out of a suitcase and surviving on a diet of Wonderbread, yogurt and giant Costco-sized boxes of granola. I took buses from city to city, meeting up with various people on the way, and while nothing particularly CV-worthy happened, I came out of it with Tolstoy-sized stories to tell.

In one particular turn of events, I ended up on a small farm in County Donegal, a few minutes from the northernmost point of Ireland, with my best friend from high school. For two weeks, we lived in a camper van with a random Polish environmentalist and worked on a small, two-acre farm. In the day, we harvested everything from potatoes and carrots to kale, rocket and tomatoes, breaking every few hours for a cup of Irish tea. In the evenings, I would run the dirt roads, hopping over mounds of cow pies and avoiding trails where the loose dogs lurked. Some days, I would cycle miles out to the rim of the coast where I could see the Atlantic roaring gorgeous and wild.

Nothing particularly eventful happened. It felt like a high school summer simply transplanted into a rural locale, where I learned seemingly small and insignificant things that nonetheless made me happy. I found out how to identify diseased tomatoes and how to crop a lettuce. Catering to my inner ‘60s child, I rediscovered my love for hip-swinging rock ‘n roll and learned to wear flowers in my hair. During the evenings, I would visit the old couple next door and play them my grand repertoire of three Debussys, fingers stumbling over 1950s piano keys.

This non-exhaustive list, however quotidian, represents what I consider to be some of my greatest summer achievements. Nothing I accomplished can be written on a CV, but I guard these memories with the protectiveness of a mother fox, if only because I derive a homely satisfaction from my experiences that is difficult to articulate or even justify.

Ultimately, what this past summer did was teach me about happiness: I realized that, sometimes, the greatest memories we end up with are not necessarily the greatest achievements on paper. There is always a choice we must make between planning for our future and living in the moment. Sometimes the two goals coincide in activities that make us happy. In the case where a trade-off exists, however, I have begun prioritizing happiness in the present over a projected happiness in the future. And perhaps I might regret it 30 years from now, but right in this moment, I feel that I let things go easier, I plan less, and I think I have become a happier person for it.

Live in the present? A fellow flower child? E-mail Sam at [email protected].