Change happens.
You don’t have to advocate for it, embrace it, or even instigate it. Change is inevitable. That said, sometimes we want change. Sometimes we need it. I made some big changes in my life in the last year. Sometimes, when you do this, it’s exciting and invigorating. But after the initial buzz of a big change things settle, they simmer, and it’s then you can begin to smell the real flavor of your ingredients, and what the hell this grand thing you’ve been cooking up might taste like. You can never really and truly know the full extent of your decisions ahead of time. You can weigh options, make a pros and cons list. Consider and reconsider. But eventually you have to jump in and swim through the reality of what you’ve chosen.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, only to paint a picture of how much I’ve changed my life in this last year, and how much it means I find myself considering what that means for me now, what it means for my future, basically just how it might play out.
I always wanted to have served in the military. I’m not an especially patriotic or militaristic person. In fact, much of my life has been spent living the antithesis of these lifestyles. But I always thought service should be compulsory, that we should be obligated to put our sweat equity towards our home, towards our communities, towards our country. I don’t want or expect that service to always be in the form of war, but the way our country and society is set up, that avenue is the most open, available, and sensible in a weird and twisted way.
I think we should have to serve a few years in our youth and pack sandbags, help with natural disasters, fix roads and bridges and serve soup and fill in as teachers and nurses. I think we should have a time where we sacrifice our personal goals and direction for that of the culture that we are part of, even if that means at time that service is taking up arms against our enemies or the enemies of freedom and equality around the world. I think that this type of service would make for a more whole and healthy culture.
This type of service doesn’t exist.
Instead we have the military. We have the peace corps. We have Americorps. We have a myriad of equally dysfunctional and inefficient programs to volunteer and donate our time to. Programs which might serve their purpose, which might enrich and change the lives of those who serve in them, or they might not.
I never served. I was busy skiing mostly. That and traveling, living freely, or freeloading. I was gardening and climbing and floating down rivers, I was wandering around in the mountains considering my existence, considering the existence of this strange and wonderful world I live in. I found a calling and I pursued it. Through this pursuit I found a career.
The desire to serve, to give back, stayed with me. And recently, I made good on that long nagging question and enlisted. I’m not active duty. I’m not that crazy. While I might have temporarily sacrificed my entire career and lifestyle for this change, at the ripe one of thirty four I enlisted with the Utah National Guard. But instead of taking a few months of for training and going back o my life, to my career that is fulfilling and dynamic, I chose a job with The Guard that could entail 2+ years of training.
And that’s where I find myself today, almost a year into this decision and yet to be guaranteed of it’s pathway, of my suitability, of my destination. Sitting with this uncertainty amongst the vast changes in my surroundings, in my situation, has been, at times, challenging.
Luckily, my age, my experience, has afforded me much more patience during this time than my 19 or 20 year old self might have possessed. I believe that my age, while generally greater than that of my peers, is an advantage in my ability to preform in this environment, and ultimately and asset to the organization with which I’m serving. That said, it’s still hard.
Moving from the desert mountains of Utah and Colorado to the flat humid sandy jungle of the southeast has been a throat punch. My coping mechanisms are gone. I cannot go for a run or a skin or a scramble and get on top of a ridge and sit and breathe. I am suffocated by trees and concrete and buildings and people.
But I am surviving.
I am following through with the decision I made and doing my best to curate the outcome I’d proposed. But we still have to wait and see. I’m being patient.
There’s another thing I always wanted to do in life. Fall in love.
I’ve done it a few times so far. With places, with people, with activities or experiences. This year, I fell in love with a wonderful, tiny little human much like myself. With Jessica. I didn’t much expect this change, or anticipate it and plan for it the way I did, painstakingly, with the previous one mentioned above.
This change, this opportunity, this miracle, presented itself subtly, it grew over time and seamlessly and easily came to be a part of my life. My personal experience with what love is or should be, I think like many of ours, is maybe not always the most healthy or realistic based on other weird and twisted expectations put on by our culture. This love, however, arrived feeling light and easy. Feeling familiar and cozy. And I embraced it. I don’t have quite as many philosophical considerations of this change as that of the previous. Maybe because it’s not causing me as much angst. Because it still feels right and easy, despite the at times drastic stress and challenge this other change has put on it.
I have about a thousand other tangents of where I wanted to take both of these subjects, but I’m going to hold off for now. I’m not exactly sure why I wanted to write this. I think, maybe because I don’t have the usual outlets of adventure and recreation I’ve built my life around, and I have a lot of different thoughts and considerations, I just want to get back to writing here to help me work out what it is I’m going through, what I’m getting at. So maybe this is just a start. To pick up the thread and tug on it. To wave and let you know where I am, or at least, that I’m still out there, still learning and trying to find our where I’m headed. I hope we’ll still both figure that out together.