To Start

In the past couple of months, I’ve mostly been either immured in work and recovering from it, or distracting myself with the gratifications of life in the city. (The ubiquity of LCD panels, the expense of being an agent of consumerism, the ease of navigating public transport and well-lit roads.) Looking back at the time gone by, I know I’ve set aside too little for quiet, because too much of it seems blurry and inconsequential. I’ve also been fiddling around with project ideas and thinking up plans and programs, but they’ve been idle ones, for the most part; I think this restless scheduling is just a symptom of the fear of spending my time inconsequentially, or of being inconsequential.

Those words didn’t come easily, and I was tempted to dismiss it as neurotic self-abasement, but I asked myself again and found that I knew it was true.

I’ve been letting things slip, basically; having to give a definition of myself under pressure, and with the apprehension of becoming other than I am, makes it easy to lose sight of whatever was authentic to begin with. I haven’t been handling stress very well at all. Too often, I’ve been opting to go along with whatever’s moving, which is all too easy to do where I work because things are always moving, and most people are busy keeping up or running hard in the opposite direction; it’s easy to just follow them, too. Everything’s been worse recently because I haven’t kept up the habit of making time (neither me-time nor slack time nor quiet time, depending on whose language I use). The fear of letting things drop and the fear of being less than up to the task makes it even easier to allow myself to be driven and to get caught up in everything. These fears were a lot less overt and a lot more subversive to my mind, of course, but now I see what was there.

So I asked God to forgive me for being willful and sluggish and fearful. I am praying for faithfulness and focus and humility. I am praying that as I contend with authority as well as the use of it, I will look to my first authority.

I think it was on Friday afternoon that I realized I really didn’t want to feel tired and driven anymore. On Friday afternoon I experienced what it was like to set the tempo again, and I realized I missed the feeling. Experiencing it in the course of work was also decidedly refreshing, after feeling kind of out of tune for a long while.

Confirming The Ground

It’s been five weeks since I’ve taken up my appointment. My recruits enlisted the day I started work at the company, so I was as new to being a commander as they were to being in the army. As my recruits settled into the army routine, I was busy settling in myself. I found that my routine was more flexible and that most resources were available to me. I found where to get the necessary information for my work, and to what extent I was responsible for acting on information I received.

I have also found that being a commander is very different from experiences I’ve had that I’d thought might be similar. I’ve been a maanger of a system and a manager of resources. I’ve also been a coach and a mentor. I’ve coordinated events and activities and led planning meetings. This means that I’ve had assistants, 徒弟 (not students, and not quite apprentices either), and understudies. I’ve not yet had subordinates who, from the outset, expect me to be better somehow, by virtue of my rank and the fact that they have very little leeway in deciding whether or not to do what they’re told. That they perpetually have to do what I tell them is a constant reinforcement of the deference they first gave me on credit. I should qualify: I do not believe that I am intrinsically superior, and neither do my men believe that they are lower forms of being; respect is still earned, and once the men are settled they see things quite clearly. However, I am unused to accepting the trust implicit in our relationship and situation. What is that situation? My men are prepared (or constrained) to do what I tell them, even when there is no room for clarification or questioning, the fact that I am their commander being sufficient for them to act.

There is a weight of responsibility, and also an imperative to accept that trust; it is not an option for me to refuse it, so, on my part, it becomes imperative for me to do my ‘duty’, which is ultimately what we take on ourselves, even though there are usually woefully inadequate guidelines provided to us.

On the matter of trust, I should note that it is something I give very readily (although as I grew older I increasingly recognized where it was ill-deserved as well). Conversely, I quite actively avoided situations where I would have to assume some implicit trust given. Even in other appointments I’ve held, I’ve earnestly attempted to have my subordinates do only as much as I did, and only because they saw as much of a reason for it as I did. (This approach is unsuited to many ‘leadership’ positions, however; I’ve done well or passably well in the past because I was fortunate with regards to the job scope.) My readiness to invest others with my trust is probably also proportional to my reluctance to be in their position; so much for my nature. (It is also part of my nature to be comforted by putting what is difficult to articulate into words.)

Still, where I stand, there is much cause for thanksgiving. In January I made certain choices to the end of preventing myself from spending my time in the army comfortably, and forcing myself into places or situations I knew I would choose to avoid if I had a choice;  there was a risk, but my commitment would be limited to a set period of time, and I anticipated that I would have room to grow a good deal. I am five weeks into facing many of those situations, and nine months on the course that I started on with much less forethought and clarity than my words may imply.

Direction & Misdirection

After seven solid days on set, the persona that is Sergeant Derek has at least been fleshed out. Among other things, he is the custodian of weapons and their accessories, and he counts, inspects and logs in a cell-like room with many locks. His job allows him some licence to be obsessive-compulsive. (In many ways, he is reprising another role.) He tries to be strict and injects sternness into his tone of voice and expression, but he does not play this role well because he is generally too happy and too approachable to be seen as the disciplinarian. Once, a black mood took him, and since then, the recruits have been careful; the storm signs can be seen from a long way away. So they push the envelope. Sergeant Derek also leads songs and cheers, although sometimes he can’t help but feel as though it is because no one else can summon up enough belief to not feel ridiculous. He would do better to get more in-character.

*

Sometimes I feel like I am crossing over from one world into another while on the ferry. Whichever direction I go in, it feels as though the fairytale evaporates and leaves reality as the product, even though I am usually leaning more towards one side than towards the other at any given time. Still, it is disorienting.

Earlier I took the train straight down to City Hall pretty much on impulse; when I realized that I was walking along the track the day after the race, and that I only found out who won by glimpsing the front page of a copy of the Straits Times in Starbucks, and that I’d spent race weekend worrying about logbooks and learning operating procedures, I felt as though where I was then was in many ways as far removed from the other reality as I could be, and I was unnerved by how forcibly I had reoriented myself.

I have two days before I have to re-orientate, that is, face east; having to constantly do that can’t be healthy, since it means that I’m mistaken about my direction about half the time.

Viva La Resistance!

The knowledge, or presumption, that I’ll be somewhere else doing something else after a year and ten months of service makes it impossible for me to be as committed to the organization and its ethos as what is implicitly being demanded of me. At some point, what I am being told about values and responsibility and norming and alignment just becomes:

Link is external.

The combination of unusually chilly air conditioning and the unremitting emphasis on select ideas while keeping the audience a captive one every day for a week, eight hours a day, hardly seems innocent. The benefit of the doubt is given, but I also want to make a statement of intent: I resist!

*

Seriously, though, I can accept much of what has been painstakingly explained to me (sometimes in a voice that sounds sick of what is being said, or in a knowing and subtly condescending tone), but only up to a point. I have other convictions, and I am hardly an empty vessel waiting to be filled. That said, I am convicted that I should do my level best in my appointment, but I do not believe I am in the business of mass production. (Or fulfilling quotas early.)

Remembering My Country

Oh, how I wish I could go wandering around the city area like I’ve been doing so often this year, or that I could be anticipating braving the crowds around the bay area tonight with friends. I don’t remember ever having spent National Day overseas before, but here I am spending my first National Day in National Service confined to one floor of a building with forty other guys in the same cramped room with the windows closed because of the typhoon.

But I have prayer, my notebook, and a little space for musing. I also have canned coffee (acceptable) courtesy of the vending machine, and, very happily, some excellent chocolate. I suppose I’m actually feeling rather fortunate and grateful here on my upper bunk bed, despite being in some danger of hitting my head on the ceiling.

On days like national day, I like to try to remember what I was doing the year before. I don’t have access to my blog now, but a glance through the earlier pages of this notebook seem to suggest that I was preparing for IOC. (Ye-es, I remember that.) Further dredging of my memory stirs up some vague impressions of a rather emo MSN convo, so I think I spent it at home. So much for remembering. [Note 070909: Looks like it was quite a happening month after all.]

Today also happens to be Sunday, and according to my buddy’s watch, I would be in church now if I wasn’t in Taiwan. The temptation to vegetate in the bunk is an easy one to succumb to, but I am compelled to do otherwise, and now I shall attempt to fulfill my intention.

Soon I Will Embark, But Not Yet.

The organization that is our armed forces has disillusioned one of my friends to the point that where he once had lofty and admirable aspirations in the direction of academic and intellectual achievement, the only aspiration left in his worn-down mind is to be a civilian. (At the risk of sounding gloatingly gleeful) I’ve had four days to live like one, and it is awesome.

These four days have proven to be valuable. It was rest and recovery time I needed quite acutely, and it’s been a time of spiritual and mental preparation as well. Also, the chance to live like a civilian for this uncommonly long period of time is an experience that has been intensely sweet.

RIght now, for example, I’ve had time for reflection, and I’ve prayed in a way I’ve not been able to do in quite a long time. It’s a luxury, in a way, because sometimes life and obligations don’t leave you enough breath or space for it. Right now, I also have coffee, which, for me, you know, makes most things better. (Even if the coffee isn’t fantastic, but I knew it was a risk.) And right now, I’m also in quite a perfect spot for people-watching. The view is also quite good, even though it is a little dim. I am under a bridge. The people are mostly tourists and they’re everything from carefree and buoyant to purposeful or even unhappy, which is kind of like my weekend, I suppose. It’s been a relief and a joy, but there’ve been stresses and angst as well. I guess both of my two lives have their struggles, although I more easily make light of or push aside the concerns of one in the face of the more pressing demands of the other.

But yes, I’ve realized I do have two lives; I’ve naturally resisted accepting one of them, but that would be a futile effort now. But, more and more, I’ve realized the other one is still very much there, although it’s quite different from what I had before I had two lives, and although I’ve felt that it was being taken away from me.

A few days ago, when I started to consider the idea that I had two lives, one of the things I wondered about was which way I’d swing. I guess now that I’m slightly less unaware of the nature of my situation, I know the real question isn’t so much of where I should swing but how not to fall blindly into one or the other, since I do have responsibilities in both that I take seriously. It is true that one man cannot serve two masters, but at the same time a man must know where he stands, and it becomes all the more important to remember who the true master is. That being said, relations with my would-be masters are probably going to be problematic just the same, but men have been in the same situation before, and those problems aren’t on my immediate horizon.

So I thank God that I’m able to embark on my next, well, adventure from a solid foothold. I know the careful and conservative part of me is still dreading the pain of seven days of Warrior and 80 klick of Long Stride, but otherwise my anticipation is less of the painful sort than the excited sort. And, as I had the chance to affirm to a friend yesterday, I know God will bring me through it somehow or by some way, and I’ll be better for it or I’ll end up somewhere better.

Because I don’t know if I’ll have the time next weekend: Starlight, here I come! (Cue music.) But if I do have the time, I’ll do it again.

To the people I acknowledge far too rarely, thank you for your prayers.

Country Music and the End of Abstinence from Coffee

From a few hours ago:

My mood is on a definite Up right now, and I know I’m going to be feeling really mellow later. This isn’t a strictly-speaking happy kind of ‘up’; it’s more of a pleased-with-life-and-smiling kind of up. I suppose the feeling comes from me laughing at a kind of inside joke between myself and the rain pouring outside; it’s a good joke, but it’s the kind of joke that I’ve been tired of thinking about lately because there aren’t that many who’d get it and few enough I’d share it with and most of the week I’m stuck somewhere away from them.

I managed to write that down before this country song suddenly started in my head. I don’t know where it came from exactly, although I suppose it has to do with some of the thoughts I’d been thinking of writing about mixing with the Friday Night Lights I’ve been watching. (I started watching it on Friday but I’ve watched quite a bit of it already. It’s quite awesome. I know I’m more than a year behind.) But it was exciting because it’s the first time I’ve managed to start writing a song with the words first. So, that interrupted me.

In other news, not a drop of anything caffeinated passed my lips for five solid days. (Cue applause.) That commendable effort was bolstered by the departure of my appetite brought about by my illness. And it ended spectacularly tonight at my favorite coffee place (remembered here, heh). The brew for today was the same as the one I had the bad judgment to try at Jurong Point two weeks ago, but they didn’t screw it up here (that’s why it’s my favorite), and it was terrific. It could’ve been the best cup I’ve ever been aware of having. Or, as Kenny reminded me, it could have been the sweet, sweet taste of addiction.

But yes, it’s been a good day after a comfortable, but dull and sometimes painful week. I still haven’t written down some of the stuff I’ve been meaning to, but I suppose the important ones have been covered some place or other. Here’s to the last day of the weekend and the last week before Grandslam!

Resting Uneasy

The past eight weeks have not been a test of strength or will as much as they have been a test of patience. The initial weeks were easy going, but thereafter I experienced a mounting frustration at the pervasive selfishness and lack of self-discipline and pride. What was worse was that these attitudes and the problems that clearly arose as a result were not addressed in any meaningful way; this only encouraged their perpetuation. 

In such an environment, it becomes very easy to do just as well as everyone else, even if that means to cheat where you can and to cheat together. To put it in the terms I did makes things clear-cut, but when one is in the thick of things, the argument sounds more like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with doing enough to get by.’ I think the past weeks have been a test of integrity as well, though not one that I can claim to have always passed. What successes I have had in this area were not of myself, in any case. 

Overall, I think the past weeks have been a challenge, but one that has been far from straightforward. Being straightforward to myself about what I know I should or shouldn’t do or join in has required some effort, but at the same time, doing the right thing or the better thing has not always been straightforward. I find that I’ve had to go about things differently sometimes, because there are things about people and groups of people I could no longer take for granted. 

I think my biggest takeaway from the course is my dissatisfaction, not just with the circumstances, but also with my responses to them. I hope that my conviction that things could have been better and that I could have done better at or been wiser about bringing some measure of change about will serve as some kind of motivation, even as I recognize that most of my frustration was in itself fruitless, and that there is a real limit to what can be accomplished at a given time and place.

Provocation

I quote my post from The Increase:

On the glass wall of the church office, a number of colorful paper butterflies arranged within the outline of a crown were displayed in an area carefully bordered with tape, presumably for the perusal of the students of and visitors to this good Christian school. Each butterfly carried a message, often a hastily scrawled one, about what it meant to have new life. It was Easter. 

One such scrawled message: ‘I’m still searching for it,’ stood out, for several reasons. Among the short, snappy cliches and the oh-so-meaningful mini-epics around it, the message seemed heartfelt. I actually laughed at it at first, almost reflexively, because of the existential angst I could easily imagine it being wrung out of, angst being something my teenage broodings were marked with. My teenage years are almost over, but I haven’t yet grown out of my self-conscious reflexes. 

‘I’m still searching for it,’ is also one of those declarations regularly rehashed in television and in other media popularizing a kind of resolute inconclusiveness. It would just have seemed trite if it hadn’t been swimming in chicken soup, but, because of either the context or the stress I could imagine it being wrung from, I thought it was sincere, and hours later, it got me thinking. 

I think one of the things I realized was that I had drifted into a kind of complacency with regards to my own new life. I think I assumed that if I had asked myself what my new life was, I would have had a good answer. I did have the shape of an answer in mind at the time, something to do with truth and freedom and the realization that in an uncertain world we are only beginning to know where we stand, but, as you can see, it is still barely the shape of an answer. 

The next thing I realized was that whoever it was that wrote the note was writing from somewhere I haven’t totally left either. I still think about life and meaning, even if I wouldn’t say I was still searching for new life. I realized that if I had felt or affected some kind of jaded cynicism at the point in time I glanced at the mass of notes on display, the feeling or attitude wasn’t something that I could be comfortable with having. I think complacency describes the state I was in on this level as well. 

I suppose that scrawled note was the start to what could be called a change of heart.

Things To Be Sure Of

As with most things we leave behind, we only realize what exactly we will miss about them some time after we’ve left them. THey’re quite often small things, but then we remember them because they were, in their small way, important. It is the absence that makes itself felt, and even if we thought we knew what we left behind was good, well, this heart grew fonder. 

My first week in a new environment hasn’t been challenging, exactly (read: slack), but I think it’s been less than easy in other ways. While I did suspect that Z/1/2 was exceptional, I suppose I was reluctant to consciously lower my expectations for the future. Either I was right before, or my current situation is the exception in the opposite direction. I hope things will improve with time, but I hope I don’t get used to the way things are now if they continue this way. A friend of mine once wrote something along the lines of ‘the reek of mediocrity’ (or was it ‘the stench’?), and, really, it is something you feel in the air; it’s also hard to ignore, especially when the voices in your head make themselves conspicuous. 

I think many people have voices in their heads that remind them about things whenever they’re in a certain type of situation. This week, I found that I’ve got a new one in my head: the voice of my first PC, complete with the emphatic expletives. This means that there has been a lot of swearing going on in the reaches of my mind whenever I didn’t manage to ignore the sloppy drills and lousy attitudes I’ve happened to observe, and I think you can imagine how that aggravates. Nine weeks have left their mark, evidently; but then again, one of my teachers once characterized me as a kind of tabula rasa, although he put it in less definite terms, because his England not so good, and his Latin also. In any case, I suppose this means I’m still impressionable. 

Right now, the flame of my discontent is still burning, but I know I’ll be tempted to lower my standards. I think my expectations will inevitably change, but at this moment, I actually feel strangely confident that my attitude won’t. I think it’s a good thing, and I suppose that, whatever the next few weeks will be like, this is something I can be proud of.