Revisited

It's Saturday again, and I'm stuck at work! Believe me, there's nothing I'd like better than to be home right now, instead of out here doing nothing. It seems often in the Army that the higher up on the chain of command you are, the more separated from reality you are. Too bad we don't get paid overtime.
In other news, not much. Things are pretty much the same as they've always been. I heard that I'll automatically be promoted if I join the Special Forces, but am not sure if I want to change my job in the Army, or for that matter if I'm too old to make the cut. But I know I have the test scores for it, at any rate. And besides, it would be nice to be somewhere where the action is for a change. This also has been on my mind a good deal lately. It seems like there are a lot of people who just don't seem to care in this unit. Perhaps they do, and I'm looking at it the wrong way. But nonetheless, it's a toxic attitude once you catch it. True, we waste a lot of time and resources because some commander somewhere has a bug up his nether regions about something or other, resulting in a project that could have taken a fraction of the time and resources it did to accomplish the same end. But I realized, just because other people don't care, this is by no means the last step on the journey for me. This is a jumping-off point, in many senses. It could be a jumping-off-a-cliff point if I'm not careful! I'm beginning to feel more and more like The Fool, walking along the edge of a cliff in the Tarot deck. He could make it to wherever he's going, or he could wind up six feet under, or for that matter splattered all over the ground at the foot of that cliff. But is that any reason to give up, or to go hide under the bed? If you want to stay safe, sure. But at what cost? Better to go and take the risk than to always wonder from safety. At least, that's what I think. And in time, I hope to look back and say, I did all I could.
So what does the future hold? Well, I plan to retire and live a long time. But that's a longer term goal. In the meanwhile, balancing the checkbook is just as much of a dragon slaying as anything else currently out there. And get my house in order. I keep thinking back to Connecticut and surrounding areas, and often have to catch myself thinking how that's no longer just a quick trip away, and this brave new world is home now. But nonetheless, I hope someday to make it back there, not in defeat, but this time as victor and vanquished, or whatever the phrase is. There's a good deal of things in the past- some good, some bad. It can be useful for drawing strength from, or even just to let your mind wander to stranger and remembered shores. But when that becomes your whole world, then that can harm you. True, there is very little in the way of an actual, objective world, as it's so colored by perspective and our relation to it, but nonetheless, I need to be in it, to focus on the tasks at hand, and stop daydreaming so much. Especially when there's nothing going on, it's easy to slip into a kind of daydream. The problem has been for me recently a lack of perspective, lack of reference points. The sun no longer rises in the same spot every day, the moon doesn't move through phases anymore. So it was that I had to come back into an awareness of the world around me and come back to what's really important in life. I hate to sound all New Age-y, but it's a question of personal development. Either move forward or stagnate, and there's plenty of time to stagnate later. So I'll do my level best not to waste any opportunities to advance. After all, what's the sense in not?