“Up for coffee? Or a short walk?” I inquired.

“Sure–a short one, that is. Oh my goodness, is that your calendar?” he asked, an incredulous look flashing across his face.

I looked back at the terminal’s screen, a Pollock painting of overlapping events, color-coded by type.

“Um, yeah… but I can explain!” I replied with an slow, embarrassed smile.

….

The problem is that, in addition to putting down the places and times where I absolutely must be, I also put down places and times where I could do something, provided that I have the time, interest, and energy. I think of it as “keeping my options open.” That meeting runs longer than expected? No problem, I’ll end up missing that late afternoon technical talk, but I can still make it to this other interesting gathering or optional sports practice in the evening. Thanks to the lessons of Prof. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, I know, at some superficial level, that this is almost, if not entirely, counterproductive. His book, in a nutshell: the more options I have for how to spend my precious few free evenings, the more likely I am to end up sitting on my couch, twiddling my thumbs and surfing the internet.

However, there is a confounding factor at work. As my research and teaching responsibilities have evolved, my work day has transitioned from hours alone at my computer, wrestling some piece of code into submission, to hours spent assessing students’ understanding of technical material, spontaneously generating questions and hints to steer them toward a more accurate working model of how things work, or leading hour long problem-solving centered recitations for twenty or thirty very bright, but occasionally unconscious (slumbering) undergraduates. It is very rewarding, and has all the ingredients to facilitate flow: “the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

Now that I regularly experience flow in the process of fulfilling my academic responsibilities, I no longer need athletic experiences, which, for several years, were the only way I experienced flow. In fact, rather than go to a wrestling practice, I am almost embarrassed to admit that I’d much rather recover from the demanding, rewarding day with a cup of tea or coffee and a good book, with a healthy dose of staring out my window and a dash of boredom.

However, doing whatever I feel like doing at the moment is not a recipe for lasting happiness and societal contribution. Discipline is doing what we don’t necessarily feel like doing at the moment, because we know our overall well-being will be greater in the long run.

For a while I was using that understanding of discipline to try and talk myself into going to sports practice after my new schedule of long, intense days, even if I felt like vegetating on my couch. (If you couldn’t tell, I have a really comfortable couch. )

However, that’s a rather obvious, and limited application of the principle of discipline. While it’s easy to say that I demonstrate discipline if I get myself off the couch to go work out, it’s also important to recognize that there’s discipline in limiting what I do so that I can do it well and still satisfy my own needs for solitary time and boredom and significant stretches of time where I don’t need to be anywhere at any particular time. I think this concept didn’t occur to me before, because my work used to be solitary, and I didn’t need to be anywhere at any particular time to do it. Being alone with my thoughts didn’t need to be scheduled; it was unavoidable.

Either I just wrote a very “well-researched” excuse for why I haven’t been training much lately, or I’m working out a way to balance an increasingly exciting career with a desire to evolve and flourish as an amateur grappler. I vote for the latter interpretation.

“There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.”

-Robert de Niro

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…….

I headed home to help my parents celebrate their anniversary and also help them either pack up, discard, or donate my belongings before they move to a new place. I wasn’t looking forward to going through all my stuff from years 0 through 18, because it might mean making some hard decisions, but instead, it turned out to be a revelatory experience.

I began to go through, piece by piece, every article of artwork, every notebook filled with cartoons and lists, every poem, story, and essay that someone had saved, from pre-school through early high school. I was struck by the audacity of my former self. She did not couch things with “maybes” and “I think.” She wrote, and I quote, “I am a girl who imagines and invents” as the repeated theme of her “I am” poem assignment in elementary school. She raced against her own personal best mile times, had not picked up any cultural disdain for feminine things, nor did she seem to be aware that working with electronics “was for boys.”

At first, I was tickled and more self-confident as I realized just how far back my sports affections went, and my penchant for story-telling, and technology, as if that validated or explained my continued attraction to them now. But I also recognized that my young self felt an enormous desire for deep social connection. (A running family joke was that every day during my early childhood, when I woke up, the first thing out of my mouth was a question about who I’d be playing with that day.) That desire for connection was perhaps so high that it left my little self feeling lonely, and acutely aware of it. When we moved to a new state, the pain of being separated from friends and feeling isolated came up again and again in my letters and writing assignments.

The weekend came to an end, and I returned to Boston and immediately went off to a wrestling practice. It turned out that I’d missed a party, now being described to me in detail, thrown for and by my fellow wrestlers, which I wasn’t invited to, and I felt an almost overwhelming feeling of being left out and alone.

…

Friendships are like any other relationship in that the interest in being friends, and what type of friends, at what intensity, must be fairly well matched or, through social cues, come into alignment, or dissatisfaction ensues and, possibly, the relationship ultimately fails. Sometimes I set my sights on friendships with people who aren’t interested in the same type of friendship.

When I got home from practice, limping emotionally, there was a message in my inbox from an old family friend I saw that same weekend. He was just expressing the simple joy of having seen me again, and I returned the sentiments. The sting of loneliness made me so grateful for this little exchange. And then I remembered that, at that same practice, there was a wrestler who remembered that we’d not had a chance to finish a conversation we’d started two weeks ago. Rather than keep a safe distance as he usually had, he took a small social risk and, through the unconscious language of body and face, he invited me to play-wrestle, just like many of the other wrestlers were. Being older, and a woman, I was never invited, and asked to partake, in their display of wrestling at, in my opinion, its purest, rolling around with each other before the official start of practice. I was so grateful for the way he included me.

This is my eighth year of life as a Cambridge resident. I’ve had sister-like best friends, an entire fraternity family of brothers, lived and studied with a hall full of undergrads, mopped floors with fellow residents of an ancient mansion-turned-low-cost-co-op, pulled all-nighters with my electrical engineering study-buddies, and talked with someone about God and philosophy and art until sunrise.

But interspersed amongst those more intense periods of social connection are these periods of loneliness, when one’s social needs aren’t fulfilled in quite the way one desires, and it’s those times that highlight and make me appreciate the many small, delicate, fleeting connections that surround us all like air, that I just might miss if I don’t take the time to note and savor them.

“When a grand master looks at this chess board, he perceives several meaningful clusters of chess pieces. When a novice looks at this chess board, they see each piece individually. … Learning changes your perception. One result of teaching is a change in your students’ perceptions,” he explained. [Paraphrased]

I paused the video—Prof. Mahajan froze—and sat back in my chair. I had never thought about teaching in that way. It made sense that, to be effective, I’d need to change my students’ perceptions. I wanted them to see, for example, meaningful relationships and clusters of variables when looking at an equation governing semiconductor devices or a mathematical transform between time and frequency domain representations of a signal. But how?

….

After writing one last note to myself, at the end of my lecture plan, I closed my laptop and grabbed my wrestling bag. I drove through the rain and turned the last equation, and its graphical representation, over and over in my mind; I’d struggled, in one-on-one teaching situations, to get my students to see that the equation was computing the same quantity as the mechanical, graphical step-by-step calculation that’s also taught every year. How could I present it so that they would in turn perceive the equivalence?

I glided through one of Massachusetts numerous rotaries, which flung me out onto a highway. NPR burbled on and on about economic news in the background. At some point, I saw an additional highlighting box on my imaginary blackboard, and the verbal explanation to go along with it. The equation summed the terms in one order, we summed the terms in a different order when we calculated it graphically. This box showed in the graphical representation what the order of summation was in the equation. I was pretty sure it would work: I still struggled to perceive the equivalence, even though I know it’s there. This diagram modification helped me, so I hoped it would help the students too.

I pulled up to the wrestling club. It was the youth kids class tonight, and I wanted to say hello to Sean and Muz, and help coach. If a larger kid needed someone to drill with, I’d jump in myself.

Soon enough, I was in my crouched stance, facing off against the one big kid in the class, as we both tried to tap the others’ knee without getting our own knee tapped, playing around with fakes. Fake to the left, go for the right, or crouch a little lower, wait for him to commit to a particular defense, and tap the remaining knee within reach, as he darted around, catching my knees on occasion as well. A flurry of knee taps on us both and we’d share a big smile. We couldn’t even keep score anymore.

Muz made us drill a particular set up. I’d place my hand on the boy’s shoulder, and he’d push it upward and away as he lowered into a crouch and grabbed my nearest leg. Over and over, we drilled this. Repetitions are critical for physical learning.

However, when we were released from the structured drilling, and allowed to just wrestle, I decided to place my hand on the boy’s shoulder, and he didn’t crouch and grab my leg. His perception had not yet changed. I kept my hand on his shoulder, and verbally reminded him to use the attack we’d just been drilling ten minutes prior. An look of mild embarrassment flashed over his face, and then he followed through, pushing my arm up and grabbing my leg. “Good,” I told him.

Throughout the rest of our time wrestling that evening, I’d randomly place my hand on his shoulder. The time it took for him to perceive the attack we’d practiced went down. And my standards correspondingly rose. By the end of practice, if he didn’t attack my leg within two seconds of placing my hand on his shoulder, I wouldn’t give him his takedown. By putting him on the look-out for an opponent’s hand on his shoulder, his perceptions of how he could attack were very slowly maturing.

If his perceptions were changing, he was learning. And I had found a way to facilitate the process. I realized that this was one of many answers to “But how?” within the context of wrestling, just as the additional box on my imaginary blackboard was an answer to ”But how?” within the context of teaching equations.

Let me just set it down for just a ’sec’ before the next rep.

For the eighth time, the blue wheel-shaped weights kissed the mat, but this time I let the mat support them too, for the briefest moment.

The blue weights fused to the blue mat, plastic weight casing melting into and interlocking with polyethylene foam and vinyl.

I pulled. Nothing. The bond was instant, and now fixed.

“Ten more seconds!!” Coach shouted out to the team, from his own station.

I pulled again, and felt my will to lift them begin to fray. I pulled again, collecting the loose ends of my will together, to keep them from further unravelling. Nothing. Without looking at the clock counting down to the next station-switch, I consciously decided to lift it, and the mat let go of my burden.

Around we went, a train of young adults, collectively sucking in air and then throwing ourselves into the next task before us, be it slamming the medicine ball into the black gym floor or pulling ourselves up so that our chin rose above the rack mounted high up on the cinderblock wall, and eventually, I was back where I started.

I lowered myself to reach the deadlift bar, and out of nowhere, Coach was suddenly in my ear, and this time, I was not just replaying some past encouragement in my mind.

“Elena, I am right here! … Don’t let this mentally defeat you!” he commanded.

1,2,3,4,5 I intoned again. He kept commanding me to lift, to keep going. I couldn’t see him: my eyes were focused on the far wall, past the teammate swinging a hammer down onto the enormous tire, past the stationary bikes and the patch of mat where a boy was sprawling and spinning, sprawling and spinning.

6,7,8,9,10 I continued. It was as if we were both lifting the weight, even though I was the only one holding the bar.

“Good job. Time!” Coach called out, for everyone to hear, and move on.

As I progressed through that last round, I never again had Coach in my ear, lifting the weight with his commands: I had to continue finding my own internal source of motivation. Sometimes it was the satisfying THWACK of the medicine ball, and sometimes it was dwelling on the following poster:

As we cooled down, I couldn’t help but wonder, How do coaches do that?

I came up with a few theories in the shower afterwards, while, a few stalls over, a training partner sang at the top of her lungs, but it was nothing but idle speculation. Magic, I concluded. For now, I’ll call it magic.

… the two girls above, captured on (digital) film by Mark Lovejoy of Wrestling Roots, wrestling their hearts out in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

I nodded, and thought I understood. I did understand, in a “Yes, but I think in pictures”-kind of way: acknowledgement tinged with stubbornness and a little (perhaps misplaced) pride in doing things my way. My other professor encourages the use of pictures, I thought.

It wasn’t until I was helping an undergraduate on the same subject matter that it hit me. “You’re being mislead by your own drawing!!” I exclaimed, a little too excitedly for the situation. By seeing her make the same mistake as me, my understanding of the mistake itself—and the true usefulness of theorems, axioms, and sequences of evolving mathematical statements—reached a deeper level.

I straightened up, in mock exaggerated offense, with a huge smile, to contradict him: “No one’s too pretty to wrestle!”

“She is,” he responded, with finality.

I didn’t push the point.

He’s not the first parent to express concerns about the effects of wrestling on gender expression. It makes me self-conscious as I go about subtly (sometimes not so subtly) proselytizing, because I am not exactly a femme fatale myself. Not according to current runway standards, anyway. I’m no ugly duckling either, but I’ll wait until short and stocky becomes vogue again before I contact a modeling agent.

This winter morning at dawn, I lay on my stomach on the floor of a warehouse-turned-Crossfit-gym, bleary-eyed and stiff, wearing a formless sweatshirt and sweatpants, attempting the “Scorpion” stretch. I turned my head toward the young woman beside me and noticed just how well she performed femininity at 7 AM on a frost-laden Friday before New Year’s. (The idea that gender expression is a social performance was introduced by post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler, but I only know that because I looked it up on Wikipedia.)

The specifics of this woman beside me—mostly her hair and outfit—aren’t important; she simply gave off the distinct impression that she had, moments before, stepped off the set of a photoshoot for a women’s fitness magazine. She made the squats that followed look graceful. If she entered a Miss America pageant with Olympic weightlifting as her talent, she’d start a new national trend.

I can appreciate her style, and still love mine. And I’ve been developing my many varied styles since I could choose my own clothes and express my own preferences to the hairdresser. Wrestling didn’t change it, and trying wrestling won’t change how other girls express themselves either, regardless of whether they choose pink sparkly nail polish to adorn their nails, or the grit and grime of a machine shop, or both.