Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

Going back to army produces this fundamental shift in your core being as to make you a less effective thinker. I mean, who else walks to the SAF e-mart, purchases some running shorts, queues up, pays for it, leaves the e-mart, goes to the canteen for teh-bing, and then goes back to the e-mart to buy running t-shirts?

I mean, it is perfectly reasonable to expect a person to report to location A, board a vehicle to location B, retrieve certain equipment, return to location A, wait for something to happen, board vehicle to location B again to return the equipment, then board the vehicle back to location A again, and then leave for home from there. Isn’t it?

Engaging the mental faculty while inside reservist has its use, and is needed if the entire platoon just wants to finish everything, and then go back up to bunk to sleep. I, for one dread thinking whenever I go back. Because the first thing that comes to my mind is the utter grit and dirt of jungle activities. The sweat and dirt really gets to you if you allow it to creep in to your mind, because that’s almost all you really can think of when you’re spending hours outside in the field.

Gu-niang-ness aside, thinking about it just causes me to yearn for the clean and breezy bed at home (or even back in bunk). Keep it up for a few hours, and it is enough to drive a sane person crazy. So, to maintain a healthy mind, many of us switch off mentally while we’re out in the field.

The trouble comes when reservist ends, and I have to re-engage my gears for work. Hell, it’s real work that I’m being paid for, and my passion; but keeping the brain on brakes for one week would have really created a metaphorical hurdle for me to cross. And that hurdle is the inertia that’s keeping me from really getting up to speed. I expect to shake off the sluggish feeling soon with enough time, and dive back in to the flow of things back at work, but it’s really, really uncomfortable to be shifting gears like that.

Thankfully, reservist comes once a year; if it came more often than that, I’m going to have to change my handling strategies. Maybe bitch about reservist more on my blog.

Filed under: General