The end of senior year was one of the most luxurious times of my life. State tennis had just wrapped up, and riddled with tendonitis, I let go of the racket for two weeks. I had been out of classes for a month. The most anticipated week of our entire seven year existence at school had arrived—for five days straight I did nothing but eat, spend time with my friends, and enjoy countless of activities (which included, but were not limited to: jumping in a bouncy house, playing blackjack at poker night, watching belly dancers at a progressive dinner, and dancing under the stars). The fun only picked up when graduation rolled around—I hit party after party and ate everywhere because the moms told me to. Yet amid all the excitement surrounding this time of celebration, a sense of guilt slowly creeped through my body. It started at my head which I had not been forced to use since who-knows-when, and trickled down to my feet that I had not pushed to exercise in a week. Some addicts need a long, hard stare in the mirror to admit to their dependence, but I’ve always known and freely acknowledged that I’m addicted to discipline.

Before this period of my life that can only be described as one bordering on gluttony and indolence, I was living a life that even Nietzsche might have approved of. My mornings started as early as 5:30 a.m. when I had a test to study for; after seven-and-a-half hours at school, I would go to tennis for another two-and-a-half hours. Home, dinner, shower, and after two more hours of homework, I would be in bed, ready to repeat the routine the next day, and make a little bit more progress toward the Übermensch. If this sounds like a complaint, I obviously haven’t made it clear enough how much I appreciated—or better, needed—this routine. Having limited time in a day made each good moment a valuable one—conversations during passing periods, the luxury of homework easy enough to do in a social environment and fair weather were rewards. Each night when my head hit the pillow, it took but seconds to drift away. Life was rigorous, but it was also easy in that what I considered challenging—reviewing derivatives at six in the morning, pushing myself on long-distance sprints—was for me, no more than routine.

I don’t believe that life should be easy—how could it be if we are meant to advance? What is progress, if not a constant push forward—literally, a progression—to bigger and better? Life will always present us with challenges—the end goal of surmounting these tests should not be to rid ourselves of difficulty, but to build upon the struggle and improve. I should not do thirty pushups so that I may never have to do them again; I should do 30 pushups so that when I have to do 40, I will feel confident in cranking out at least thirty of them, and so that I can press on to do the last ten. Every day we are faced with options that give us an opportunity to test our self-discipline, and these options manifest themselves in different ways. For me, I discovered my self-discipline in waking up early, turning down a chance to socialize and instead heading to the library, and pushing myself physically until I absolutely cannot handle more. These are by no means examples of extreme self-discipline—rather, they are simple daily choices against the frightening alternative of retrogression. I’m not saying that when you sip out of a Frappuccino every morning you are regressing our world back to the times when we thought the sun revolved around the earth—I’m just telling you that you aren’t doing anything to improve it, either. You could respond by accusing us disciples of the grind of not knowing how to enjoy life, but I would just tell you that we appreciate life fully, and that a Frappuccino tastes way better after a five-mile run anyway.