Relax, this is war

During my service in the German army (Deutsche Bundeswehr), I made
an interesting experience. During the basic military education, there
were many situations and circumstances that really sucked. This got on
our nerves, and all of us were really frustrated and pissed off. Now,
when the situations sucked beyond a certain threshold, the interesting
experience was a paradox reaction on my part: at that point, I suddenly
felt well and relaxed and acted bold and audacious.

One instance was when we had a training unit with rifles. It was
raining like all the water had reached its “best before” date. There
was a shelter section spreaded on the ground as a mat for each of us,
to dissassemble and reassemble our weapons on. One of them seemed like
it was not properly waterproofed and was dripping wet. We complained
about that, and nobody layed down on that. The corporal commanded that
one of us should, in order to start the weapon disassembling. Nobody
moved. All of a sudden, I thought this would be fun, stood up and
throwed myself down on that wet mat. Another instance was, in the same
education, one of us had to stay with the weapons during lunch. I
thought it was fun to eat in 10mins after all the other, and
volunteered for that task.

There were other instances like that: there’s a threshold when other
people start to go mad, and I get relaxed and into best mood. On the
other hand, I am often depressed while other people are in their best mood, namely, in
everyday life’s routine. As most of my life currently is made of such
routine, the latter is the normal case and I did not experience the
former for a long time. Until today, which reminded me of that part of
my character.

I stood at the car station and waited for the train to go to my home
town. There was a public announcement that the train is to arrive at an
undetermined time, due to a contact wire damage. That sucked. Than a
woman who stood nearby called her partner and yelled at him to come by
car and pick her up. I myself was in depressed mood all day, but that
cheered me up. People start to go mad? Then I’m going to relax. I sat
down on my Zarged aluminium box, got my notebook, PDA and headphones
and started some transcription work of voice notes. While the world
outside was like hey-go-mad: trains arriving without public
announcement and with wrong destination signage, train personnell
yelling at travellers, travellers yelling at train personnell, people
demaning public announcements (“Damn, can anybody tell us all where
that train goes.”). All that cheered me up for the rest of the day …
🙂

Perhaps I should take a close look at life, to recognize that it’s a
war of its own sort. That would make me relaxed and cheerful for the
rest of my life.

Relax, folks, this is war!


Start date: 2008-04-24
Post date: 2008-04-24
Version date: 2008-04-24 (for last meaningful change)


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