Taking Responsibility for Our Health

colinchamp May 24, 2021 6 Comments

When I started my undergraduate studies at MIT, all incoming freshman were thrown into temporary housing while they decided where they wanted to live for the next four years. During this process, known as “rush,” fraternities would put on several days’ worth of nonstop activities to entice freshman to choose to live in their house throughout their time at MIT. At the same time, the frats were busy in the background having periodic meetings to decide whom they were going to offer a bid. It was a very short amount of time to decide one’s living situation for the next four years, but strangely, the process seemed to work. So, in August of 1999, I found myself, clothes, stereo, and all my items stuffed into a single room at MacGregor House overlooking the turf field one block in from the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Alpha Tau Omega, known affectionately as ATO, was a cool spot full of a diversity of amazing people, thought, and skill-sets. The frat had lots of athletes and lots of nonathletes, but everyone was smart and thought-out. Several of my basketball teammates were part of ATO as well, adding to its allure. Overall, it seemed a great place to live and I pledged there during the Fall.

The frat house was a 70’s style plain brick dorm building, but a dynamic place to live

When I started there, I was struck with a massive change – this was 50 men aged 18-22 living under their own control. We may have been smart and thought-out, but we were still young and inexperienced, a fourth of us just graduated high school and had never lived outside of our parents’ house. My instinct was to fall back to the way I was raised: I grew up in a very disciplined household where everyone was responsible for their actions 100% of the time. When my grandparents watched us, it was even stricter – one step out of line and my grandfather would start to unbuckle his belt as though we were about to get a lesson, and that was usually enough to snap us back into shape.

At ATO, everything changed. Within the first week I saw someone break a glass table and nobody seemed to care. I saw another brother put his head through the drywall, and while I was pretty darned impressed, nobody also seemed to care about the giant hole left in the wall. At the beginning of each year, we would have cleanup week, where the entire fraternity came to school a couple days early and fixed up all the damage of the entire house, regardless of who caused it. Each Sunday morning, there was a several hour period called “house works,” where a cyclical schedule would allot several brothers to clean up the messes made during the week. It was my first experience with a utopian society. This strange paradise of sorts was an amazing place where everything just seemed to work out in the end. Or so it seemed.

[stextbox id=’custom’ color=’fcfcfc’ ccolor=’000000′ bgcolor=’000000′ cbgcolor=’000000′ bgcolorto=’000000′ cbgcolorto=’000000′ image=’http://colinchamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/CC-Icon.jpg’]

It is interesting that the word responsibility is being passed around these days by hospitals and doctors when it comes to billable services, but not those nonbillable ones like following a healthy lifestyle, exercising, etc.…
[/stextbox]

I recently received an email that the fraternity has completed its ban on campus. Yes, we got kicked off. There were a million reasons why, but one major one stood out to me: lack of responsibility. The fraternity ended up paying for cleaning and other services to care for the house – in essence to combat the lack of responsibility. Yet, passing the buck only worsened things. Adding insult to injury, upon visiting the house during its final years, I witnessed more and more brothers with televisions in their rooms (when I started, only one of us even had our own computer) who spent less time in communal spaces like the Chapter Room, where we watched TV together and, more importantly, had social interaction. The TVs and computers in every room showed that the sense of responsibility was waning further, as was the sense of community.

As great as lacking responsibility is in theory, it will come back to bite us in the rear end most of the time. I would argue that with our health, it bites us every time. Even though my fraternity was full of a bunch of geniuses, many of whom will one day rule the world (some are currently calling the shots at major corporations), we still couldn’t get our act together without the requirement of responsibility. No cleanup week or paid service was going to fix this. Without responsibility, no cleanup act could strengthen the shaky roots or solidify our feet of clay. The utopia turned dystopian, the house began to crumble, and now, ATO at MIT, no longer exists.

My fraternity house, like our health, requires constant upkeep, vigilance, and total responsibility. A shattered table in the hallway may get cleaned up by somebody else during “house works”, but when it comes to our bodies, there is nobody there to fix the mess (a surgeon or physician can patch things, but as my achy right knee always reminds me, prevention is the best medicine). It is up to us to maintain our health and avoid injury in the first place, and when things go awry, it is up to us to ensure they don’t go awry again. No doctor or hospital can fix a lack of responsibility. (Many hospital systems will advertise that they “have you covered,” but this is disingenuous in that this is exactly how they pay the bills and profit – i.e. from you. Most health systems would go bust if the entire population started to genuinely care about its health. Only you have you covered.)

We all have our moments, but at the end of the day when we look in the mirror, we are responsible for our actions, we are responsible for our health, and regardless of the underlying principles of our personal fraternal orders, without responsibility, it will cease to exist.

*Photo by StuartMiles from Freerange Stock

© 2021 CDR Health and Nutrition, LLC. All Rights Reserved.