"A View From the Top" by Yaphet Murphy

Have you ever gone mountain biking?

It’s easy at first, and enjoyable. You’re pedaling, you pick up speed easily. If you have a good bike with the right tires, it digs into the rough terrain and really propels you forward. You’re riding. You gain momentum. And then you hit a hill. At first, all the momentum drives you upward and you really think you’re going to be in for an easy time. But then gravity starts to exert its force on you. Slowly, each step gets harder to take. Suddenly, sitting down on your seat and cruising is no longer an option; you have to stand and heave if you are to make headway. Your whole body gets into it, trying to surmount this invisible powerful force – gravity – which threatens to stop you in your tracks. Head jutted forward, hands gripping the handlebars tightly, body swinging and legs pumping, you do your damnedest to keep yourself in motion. “Just a little bit more,” you tell yourself, and then you look up and see that it will take more than just a little bit more to get you up this hill. If you were alone, you might stop. But when you’re with your buddies, that’s not really an option. They’re all pushing themselves up the hill the same way, and if you stop, you disrupt everybody else. Besides, stop, and you’ll have to walk your bicycle up the rest of the way – it’s simply too difficult to get a running start on an uphill dirt path. That’s a slow and lonely disappointing walk. So you keep going. You question every major muscle in your body. How long before utter fatigue? Your lungs burn – you can’t seem to get oxygen in fast enough. Sweat drips from your forehead, and then it runs. Underbrush tears at your legs. You get nicked. The muscle strain is tortuous. You can’t wait for it to stop. You realize just how close you are to your limits. You can’t wait until you make it to the top of the hill, so you can take a break, and recuperate. You enter the last steps, heaving and straining all the way.

Then you make it. Awwwwwwwwwww. That becomes the best feeling in the world.

You know you’ve just taken on a beast and conquered it. You’re battered and bruised. You and your friends are all out of breath. But you’ve made it. You’ve turned an initial thought into action; a dream, a wish perhaps, into reality.

Take time to savor the moment my friends. It’s been a battle all semester, a tortuous path to get to where we are, with tons of meetings, five on-campus soirees, and twenty volunteering events under our belt, but we did it. We rolled with the punches, took our licks, kept our head up and kept on kicking. Class, friends, family, work, all begged for attention but we worked around it. We never said, “Die,” and die we didn’t.

We’re on the top of the hill right now. We survived the struggle. We conquered the beast. We picked the highest mountain around and we climbed it. We’ve done it once and we can do it again. We’re Sigma Alpha Delta! We thrive on achievement.



Enjoy the view, and the fresh air. And get ready for an exhilarating ride going down the other side. We’re experienced now. We can do it again.