If you live wholly and meaningfully, if you pursue love, success and achievement you will meet loss, failure and despair. If you don’t live, each day you will rise in complacence and retire to fear (a worse tragedy). Either path ensures anguish.
In a life that dictates you will meet adversity, be a fighter.
Be brave. Plant your feet, square your shoulders to the enemy, and fight.
The beauty for me in having this website is that I too have access to the wisdom I try to provide for my readers. But sometimes I forget that Rambling Thoughts is a resource for me as well. The awareness of this resource gets compromised amid the chaos of life, as does the wisdom I transcribe here. That was certainly the case this past July when life folded me.
Those close to me know that I excel at the behavioral sciences, social sciences, humanities, and writing. However, I struggle with the life-sciences and math. My experience with these disciplines throughout middle-school and high-school is marred by the memory of pricey tutors, constant studying and lots of grief. So, when I discovered that I had a biological processes requirement for my major that I needed to satiate to graduate, I sighed hard enough to blow a septum. Then I negotiated my disdain for the content with the reality that it’s required material before finally enrolling in BIS 101: Molecular Biology for the first summer session. Some of my fear for this class was curbed by the fact that I had just completed my best quarter ever and thoughts of doubt drowned in the praise from my family and the glory of accomplishment. However unbeknownst to me, as I wandered into the tall concrete lecture hall for the first day of instruction, I had just initiated a dog-fight.
I expounded in a previous post that with the correct strategy in tandem with discipline and patience you can manifest anything you’d like. Unfortunately, it may take years to formulate that strategy. I thought I had an effective one, however, as the course began. And I would execute it each day, studying fastidiously as the cost of a true summer. Social invitations were discarded and family events, unattended, as I remained buried in lecture videos and text-books. As per the nature of the quarter system, what would be five months of content of a semester is instead concentrated into ten weeks. Summer sessions are even less forgiving because they concentrate 10 weeks into five. So what would be a month’s worth of class on a traditional system concentrates the same material into a week of summer session. I would struggle understanding a piece of a mechanistic response in a biological process, make a note of the material and visit it later instead opting to focus on the broader models. But that piece of a mechanism will be focused on as its own mechanism the next day, and I wouldn’t understand it individually yet-alone how it interacts with other models. And because I wouldn’t understand that, I wouldn’t understand the models. These gaping holes in my understanding would grow before my eyes as the summer’s pace widened that hole. I reached out to the professor, the only one I’ve ever had who I couldn’t relate to. He’d refer me to the tutoring center, operated by faculty who conveniently took the summer off. Without understanding and without reference, I started to be without hope too.
This spectacle unfolded in Sacramento’s unforgiving heat. Each year I actively look forward to summer, but Sacramento’s is without charm. And its sun, without mercy. I would leave a science laboratory to be blasted by the 110-degree heat. The hot air acted to deconstruct me every step spend in the sun’s bask. First it would strip me of comfort, then well-being. Lastly, will-power. To validate all my labor by not failing the course, I bought two text-books and made a third. This sack of desperation weighed me down further. Initially, blocks would feel like miles, and now miles felt impossible. I traversed them regardless. But the worst thing was how aimless these miles were. I would plod from office-hours to tutoring to study-halls just to show my professor how hard I was working, but he didn’t seem to care. And these resources weren’t helpful. The needs of Bio majors (my classmates) in a Bio course differ from the needs of a psychologist in a bio course, and in study groups I would watch complex questions be rapidly solved as classmates achieved complete understanding while I continued to wrestle with elementary principles. The only science course I had taken at my university prior to molecular biology was molecular genetics, and in that course I had a series of insatiable teaching-assistants who intrinsically cared about my success (and well-being) in addition to a compassionate professor. Every resource was helpful, every person was caring, and all parties involved acted to facilitate my success. But now I was without these people. My insatiable TA’s were gone as was my direction, and these thoughts rattled in my exhausted psyche as I trekked through Davis’ heat trying to articulate a feeling I couldn’t find the words for. “Abandonment.” The streets were as blank as my journey. There was no guidance, no direction, nobody that cared, and no hope either. Those aren’t trivialities. They’re necessities, and they’re certainly necessary to a man trying to achieve something seemingly achievable.
But the thing is, even without these things I was still able to make tremendous strides towards success. Refuged 70 miles south of Davis’ sun, I set up a desk in my backyard and would devote entire weekends to studying before an exam in addition to my efforts throughout the week. The sun would rise and set beyond my laptop and study materials. The ducks flock to the pool and leave, birds would pick seeds and take off, and water-skiers would wipe out, try again, retreat back to their boat, and all these various sights and melodies would conclude as the sky’s star would retire into the mountains. I would lay to rest each evening on a body of incredible work, but as I rose to meet the workweek I began to unravel. I became less focused on all that was behind me (extensive strategy, dedicated work, many different forms of study, etc) and refocused on what was ahead of me; a big test. In a discipline I’m not talented in. Suddenly the challenge became big and I felt small. I saw all that I didn’t understand instead of all that I did. I realized all the content I did not cover instead of what I had. I would wander aimlessly through the same heat from the professor’s office hours to the library to the TA’s office hours while I lost all sense of strategy and thus composure. I saw failure as an imminent reality rather than a possibility. It was no longer about the content or my grasp of it, but rather my relation to it. My attitude, my composure, and my strategy were what would decide success but instead they ordained failure. And I met that fate not because circumstanced destined it, but because I did. I choose to let things break me with attrition. Gradually and systematically, I became unwound until the man who was administered the test was a shell of his former self.
There are boxers called pressure-fighters. They stalk their opponents around the ring unceasingly, step for step. They apply constant pressure by whaling on their opponents without pause. The accuracy of their punches is irrelevant, as is their defense, because their aim is attrition. They pursue their counterparts to break their willpower as to where their guard drops, their breathing becomes labored their responses slow, and they desperately gasps for breath through their obtrusive mouthpieces. These opponents become victims, and they clinch, run and stall by all possible means to delay their inevitable slaying. These attempts are often unsuccessful, and they usually succumb to stoppage losses. Pressure-fighters are notorious for collecting TKO wins because they wear down their opponent beyond the possibility of defense until they’re landing flush shots in succession and the referee is forced to end the bout or the opponent’s corner throws in the towel. The rigors of my summer culminated into a dream during finals week where I was standing on the wrong side of the ring from pressure-fighter and recently-crowned WBC Welterweight Champion Shawn Porter.
The stocky frame of Porter stepped began towards me. His guards were up and evil intentions gleamed in his eyes. Nearing closer, he fired a jab to test range and establish contact. My head spasmed backwards, the blow successful enough to show me what he can do. I returned fire, contending the fate he wished to ordain me. My left arm shooting into his face like an angry brown spear and landed flush. He was unphased. His hefty left fist crashed into my skull again, then again. Knowing that he could find me, he fired a right-straight (his dominant hand) that sent my skull crashing against my brain. Hurt and scared, and my knees buckled, my body flung against the ropes from the impact, and his undying jabs chasing me into a corner. Before he could begin another onslaught, I raced towards him to shove him off. Our forearms crashed together like the shields of two gladiators, and I bought myself just time to heal enough to reassess matters.
(Porter on the left)
Pressure-fighters largely disregard defense because they don’t need it. They’re not chessmen, they’re slaughterers. So when he came forward again, my back to the turn-buckles, I found many openings to exploit. I could use my reach to keep him at bay, I could pick him off with straight-rights, or I could counter him with a left-hook the next time he lurched forward. I didn’t do any of this. I didn’t even jab him off. I stood there awaiting my fate. He landed a right-hook to my body. I shuddered left. He continued to whale me with clubbing blows, ultimately landing an uppercut pieced that my guard and flung my head backwards akin to a car-crash victim’s whiplash. His attacks persisted; firing and landing and crashing while continuing to deconstruct my body and violate my psyche. His incessant blows defeated my body. Davis’ heat and the lack of resources and aid and care and the waning hope and encroaching despair were what defeated my mind. And when I could have at the very least raised my guard, to avert SOME of his shots, to initiate SOME of my will-power and ignite SOME hope, I didn’t do that either. My arms hung on the ropes, presenting my being to Porter for him to break me more freely; and without the pesky obtrusion of my sad defense.
I stopped fighting back because I thought if I stopped persisting, the challenge would too. If I surrendered to the challenge as an admission of defeat, it too would surrender as the clear victor. Things felt so severe, so desperate that such a crude notion of mercy felt realistic and subscribing to it felt honest. But this belief was deceitful, because things didn’t stop. They got worse. The final continued nearing, the work continued to be administrated, the sun was burning just as bright, and the tutoring offices just as vacant. And Porter kept landing.
He continued landing punches that were ruining my body until my legs crumbled beneath me. My friends and family screamed in protest from ringside. The remainder of the audience glanced up from their phones half-heartedly engaged. Porter dropped to his knees, mounted my body, and began crashing his fists into my skull. The referee watched on with disinterest as the attack became gory.
I was broken in my dreams and in reality too. And amid it all, I forgot a convenient truth. I am a fighter. We all have a spark within that disallows us to be overtaken by circumstance; a resilience that endows us the ability to withstand the harshest realities. And I’ve evolved mine from a spark to sometimes a subtle flame and other times a roaring fire. But regardless of its intensity, it’s always there. As a boxer, a philosopher, a psychologist and a theist. My pugilism has conditioned me to withstand the most unbearable affliction, my philosophy disallows me to accept my immediate thoughts about both life and reality as truth, and the psychologist within doesn’t let any pain to go unexamined nor last longer than it needs to. But I betrayed all these identities and that’s where half my angst came from. It was a foreign thing to do and I’m bewildered that I did it. But what bewilders me further is how natural the misfortune felt. I ultimately received perspective on this from legendary boxing trainer Teddy Atlas. In a 2015 match, he coached his fighter, former multi-welterweight champion Timothy Bradley, through a title-defense against the rugged Brandon Rios.
With Bradley in the corner between the 8th and 9th rounds, Atlas leans in to address the weaving focus of an adulated warrior capable of so more than what he’s showing.
“Listen, your concentration is weaving a little.
Pick it up. Pick it up!
The fire is coming, are you ready for the fire?
We are firemen, WE ARE FIREMEN!
The heat doesn’t bother us!
We live in the heat, we train in the heat!
It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home.
We’re where we’re supposed to be.
Flames don’t intimidate us!
What do we do?
We control the flames.
We control them!
We control them when we want to, then we extinguish them!”
If that reads zany to you, know that after that speech Timothy Bradley boxed the best four rounds of his life deconstructing, dissecting and dismantling the overwhelmed Brandon Rios. To live meaningfully is to love, to hope and to aspire. And if you live meaningfully you will spend time in the fire. But when you feel the flames intensify, that’s when you too, like Bradley, know that you are where you’re supposed to be. Those flames will become a second home to you, one capable of breeding further resilience, adulation and glory. The fire isn’t meant to tell you to stop fighting, its means you need to keep fighting further. Faster. Stronger. More strategically. And if you do this and circumstance still swallows you, know that this inner-flame kindled within is man’s intrinsic capacity of resilience and success. To fully experience what it means to be human, this capacity must be exercised regardless of outward results. Failure is not ordained. Your destiny is not decided. This is how you write it yourself, and even if you are ultimately broken things will not be as bad being broken while fighting than if you are to bow in passivity.
“Any man who goes into a cave with only one opening deserve to die.”- Frank Herbert
Regardless of to what degree, we are fighters. And regardless of how many times we are broken, this same capacity will carry us through the most grizzled times and guide us to life’s riches. Keep fighting.
