.:resilience

This is an end, and a beginning. A movement forward, and the next step in a cycle. A conclusion underlining a continuation. Things have changed, but much remains the same.

Have been keeping busy with the revamping of the website. I hope to launch it today, as a sort of milestone to mare the end of this stage in life. In the process of reformatting it, though, I went through all my past pieces of writing, one dating back as far as 1996, and a trend of growth and development is becoming evident. In studying my own writings, I detected a trend that appealed to me, that led away from insecurity and self-affirming indulgence, to a measure of sensitivity and confidence. This is growth. This is change. And this, I think, is for the better.

And, getting my civilian IC back today, I almost did not recognise the face in the photograph. The ID photo was taken in secondary school, where concerns and anxieties had been so different. Life has been different indeed; there was no way I could have anticipated this new side of me, the side that can lead and can kill, that can grow and can mature like this. And, looking back through that passport-sized window on that long-lost card, there was a vertiginous moment of non-recognisation, an eerie and uncomfortable sense of having pried into someone else's most intimate moments.

But has so much really changed? I have always seen military life as an abberation, a temporary disturbance in a continuity of civilian life, an interruption in a process of learning and growth that I had chosen beforehand. Indeed, over the last few days it has been so easy to revert back to the civilian mindset, as if I were simply dropping back to a natural steady state. Only time will tell, I guess, how much change has been introduced into the normal flow of life. So far, for better or for worse, the change has been minimal.

But to see the army phase as a separate facet of life entirely is too easy. No matter how I try to compartmentalise it, ideas and mannerisms spill over to the civilian sphere. Over time, whether I liked it or not, I had come to slowly accept it as part of the integrity that is my life. The definite achievement of this time, I think, is that I have learned to like it despite everything, to find that particular perspective that allows me to accept the realities of the military while staying loyal to my original principles and values.

And so, while it has not been all fun, and has not been all that I had hoped for it; despite all this, it has been worthwhile. Something valuable had been made out of these twenty-two months, something enriching, fulfilling and deeply satisfying in a way that only making a true difference to real people can inspire. And that makes this whole episode, I think, something as worth remembering as the most important of my memories.

The contents of the blue journals in my collection, which have borne the weight of twenty-two months of graphite throughout this singular period, will remain for the most part as only handwritten accounts. A small portion could be turned into future writings, if the inspiration strikes me. The exception is this entry; at the end of this age of handwriting, this entry is both the last of those written in the blue journals, and the first on this new online journal.

This is the ending that establishes a link. A resolution that points the way to continuity.