Despite being a senior citizen by the standards of the average Red Hawk student, I am on the team. It serves as a way to stay in great shape, fire the competitive furnace, and stave off growing up. And, let’s be honest here, graduate school is first and foremost a way to avoid growing up.
I mention the wrestling team because we recently went to wrestle in a two day tournament in Pennsylvania. I’ve lived in a lot of places—liberal towns and redneck havens and most points in between. Wherever I found myself, I knew where to meet good people. At RPI I meet these people in the wrestling room, the pool, out running a local 5K, rover in Ricketts having a smashing ChemE department party. The commonality of all good people is that they are passionate about something, enough so to spend excess time and energy to pursue it. It so happens that many of my passions tend to involve physical exertion. My worst days are the ones in which I let anxiety about deadlines or laziness keep me from pursuing what I love most. When I meet people who are unhappy, it is so often because they are unable—by inertia or true disability—to do what they really want.
Life gets difficult when passion and vice intertwine. We’ve all been preached to about drinking, drugs, sex, smoking, overeating, etc., but most of the public health service notifications miss the point. I will not tell you that the aforementioned recreations are necessarily good or bad things, but perhaps some of you enjoy one, or more, enough to call it a passion. Perhaps it has become an addiction. I argue today that passion only becomes vice when you don’t adapt to it.
For my first three years in Troy, I had a true vice. Long winters, lack of friends, and a daily commute led me to cookies. It started out as just a few, but in the Union, a dollar can get you three delicious cookies of almost any variety (chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin). By the time I realized that I was no longer in control of the situation, I was skipping regular lunch and dropping a five on my cellophane-wrapped temptresses. I wasn’t able to stop cold turkey; all the deals I made with myself failed. I’d try to eat a full healthy lunch, but my stomach could tell the difference between meatloaf and macadamia nut morsels. At my nadir I counted how many cookies I ate in a month: 278. You know the old vignette about the alcoholic slapping the bartender in the face and slurring I’ll tell you when I’ve burp had enough? Replace the bartender with a teenage girl at the bakery counter, and that was me.
I stand before you today as a man free of his addiction. What did I do? I gave up. I stopped feeling bad about it. I am okay now because I have accepted the price of my passions, and I pay it; I am at the gym every morning, and I am in the wrestling room at night. In between I hit the pavement to run or the pool to swim. When wrestling ends I concentrate my evenings on Jiu Jitsu. By this, I am able to use one passion to enable the other. Oddly enough, I eat only a few cookies a week now; I enjoy them more than ever, and it doesn’t even feel like I’m trying.
