Zach Lederer was 11 when told he had a brain tumor. The master Dr. Ben Carson performed the surgery to remove it, which put Zach in a week-long coma and left friends and family wondering what would happen next—if he'd be able to walk, if he'd be able to talk, if he’d even wake up. When dealing with something that affects around 2000 American children each year, it’s difficult to be enthusiastic about the next day or next minute.
Zach told the statistic to get lost. He eventually regained consciousness, endured months of recuperation, and was described by Carson as having the fastest recovery he’s ever seen. No moping. No lamentation. As his friends would hear him say, he was just “living the dream.”
He played sports and managed his football and basketball teams all through high school. Eventually, he picked the right choice of attending the coolest, smartest, and undeniably handsomest school on the east coast. As the Maryland Terrapins basketball manager, he was doing the job he was best at. As a college freshman, well, we all know how wild that year was. He was living the dream—no more, no less.
A new year brought a new challenge. Zach found out he had another tumor in January 2012 and underwent surgery by the end of the month. He wasn’t the uninformed little kid he was last time around. He was 18 and knew about cancer. Most importantly, he knew he had to show no reservations.
The new year also brought a new movement. When he got out of that second surgery in the past eight years, he leaned up on his hospital bed, flexed his muscles, and told his dad to take a picture. Zach’s cousins replicated the pose and put it on Facebook with the caption: “Tebowing is out, Zaching is in.” The Internet proceeded to burst into flames as everyone from Lil Wayne to the Times Square Naked Cowboy uploaded pictures of themselves doing what is now considered a symbol of unprecedented determination and zeal.
A symbol always holds more power than what it actually represents. An action is performed at a single point in time and can never be done the same way again because the time has passed. Symbolizing the action allows the action to be repeated the same way, but the meaning of the symbol changes with each individual because the symbol shapes us. We don’t shape it.
Zaching represents something different for us college students than it does for children or parents. To us, it means calmness among chaos. I can recall the dozens of times I berate my roommates for not wiping the toilet seat or cleaning up after themselves. I can recall many late nights in December and May where I’ve wanted to put my fist through a wall because I had no idea how to juggle the 13 projects, 25 papers, and 47 exams I needed to work on. I also think about how I hurt other people and how I can’t stop myself from doing it most of the time.
When I first saw the picture of Zach throwing his dukes in the air after invasive life-threatening surgery, it represented the importance of keeping it cool when the stress of your dizzyingly busy life is hammering you into the ground. That one pose at that one moment in time is a reminder to guys our age to keep composure as we start the part of our lives where the stress never stops.
I met Zach briefly at a party my sophomore year. We talked for maybe 30 seconds and I doubt he remembers me, but that’s the point—he’s influenced more people than he’ll ever know.
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