By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

One of the greatest days of my life came when I was quite young, sitting in science class. I was always a good student, but had trouble when assignments grew into multi-day or multi-week endeavors. The stress of a science fair project felt like an elephant sitting on my chest: daunting and impossible to know where to start. The Dumbos of my youth were gone, and this new pachyderm packed quite a punch.

As a child you assume that the world is either entirely orderly or pure chaos; growing older and understanding that neither is particularly true can be a demoralizing and paralyzing recognition of the challenging mountain each of us must climb. But the day I first learned about the relationship between potential and kinetic energy, in the form of Newton's First Law of Motion, I saw the peaks before me shift into ramps so that I may fly, if I flapped my wings consistently (I also had big ears, which helped).

Newton’s First Law of Motion describes ‘inertia’, the natural law that states an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, also known as ‘momentum.’ The morning I learned that such a succinct force governed the universe, and therefore my little life as well, was the day I learned how to transform my mountains into ramps: pebble by pebble, and feeding the elephant only one peanut at a time.

One of the most annoying tidbits passed around every Christmastime is the that gym memberships increase by about twelve percent each January, as the population attempts their “New Year’s Resolutions,” with these figures dropping off only a month or two later. I was a pedantic child, who grew up to be a very pedantic man, so at literally no point have I felt anything other than dumbfounded shock that people assign self-improvement to something so arbitrary as the calendar, probably lecturing some adults at a Christmas party, “Santa Claus is definitely real, the Easter Bunny is my best friend, and the TV says that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction…but I wasn’t born yesterday: you dorks are lazy.”