Albert Einstein and life

“Life is all about choices. How many people are trapped in their everyday habits: part numb, part frightened, part indifferent? To have a better life we must keep choosing how we’re living.”
– Albert Einstein

I didn't think much of this quote when I first saw it, because I thought it was just plain stupid for someone to pin it up against the notice board at the entrance of an army camp cookhouse. A well-meaning nugget of wisdom it is, but I just couldn't reconcile it with my current situation then. Maybe I was too caught up with the usual laments about being conscripted and not being able to make big decisions about my life (let alone choose how I want to live, right?), and well, that's really just part and parcel for an ordinary man in the SAF. But a conversation with a fellow platoon mate yesterday night on the train made me rethink the meaning behind the quote for once, or at the very least, its context. I felt it was interesting, the way he so colourfully described to me his various schemes and methods to climb the 'status ladder', how he progressed from RMJ, to light duties, to 'excuse dust', and finally, to the much-coveted 'excuse stay-in'. Yeah, he's a stay-out personnel, gets to sleep at home every night, and doesn't need to follow us out into the field for operations and exercises. And as he went on to tell me how the other statuses in the platoon aren't 'doing very well', I was somehow completely caught off-guard, because it wasn't until then that I realised that skiving was a completely separate business in its own. You don't 'not do very well' if you're simply ill or injured. It's about knowing the tricks of the trade. How to plan your medical appointments. How to extend your status. How to make sure you go for the right programmes and skip the unappealing ones (as if it's all just one huge buffet meal). And most importantly, how to play the game of cat-and-mouse with your superiors who so badly want to get you back in training.

In a sense, it was a conversation which served as the final blow, the last trace of glamour being stripped away. Those random bouts of in-camp depression used to make the grass on the other side look so strikingly green to the point of glaring, and I would ask myself why I was still committed to the job, when the usual few could 'get away with doing next to nothing'. But at that point, I stopped thinking that way. All I could think about then was how I was just so... repelled. Imagining the scenario in which everyone of us just fell out and stopped doing what we needed to do because we thought of only ourselves, I felt truly disappointed, yet I understood why I decided to hang on as long as I was fit enough to do my job. Yes, there will be many more times in the future where I will think like the person who casually glances at the quote while waiting for the rest to finish their meals at the entrance of the cookhouse – that I'm just another ordinary man in the SAF. But be it mistakes or 'job well done's, I'm at least gonna be there when I have to, to be responsible when I should. To be honest, I don't actually despise him or the few of them for choosing how they want their lives in the army to be like. All I know is that I'm gonna choose to stick to this kind of life I'm leading here, because I don't see how I can leave NS dignified any other way.