Guilty Conscience

So I'm home again on a weekday, supposedly to re-work on the NDP video. Basically the task at hand now is to shorten our original video to 3 minutes, which really shouldn't be that difficult. Unfortunately, our 老大 wants to milk this for all its worth, telling our officer how long and difficult it will be, thus requiring us to be out of camp till the end of September.

As much as being out of camp is a wonderful luxury, I am extremely uneasy about this exploitation of the system. This is especially since whether we are permanently posted out to work on NDP is still unclear. As a result, despite not being in camp for extended stretches, I worry that I may still be liable to go back to camp to participate in training and go to EX WALLABY come October. All this would have been so much better if we were given the green light to work on NDP full-time, but alas, that is not the case, hence my uneasiness. But what to do? If strong characters in the team prefer to push strongly to stay out of camp to avoid training as much as possible, I can't really be the wet blanket and spoil market.

Must thank Yvonne for pointing out this outstanding article in her blog. It's something I've thought quite a bit about before, that the mindset that work should make us happy is a modern phenomenon. I didn't really have any historical basis for my judgement, but I just reflected on what people of my parent's and my grandparent's generation did, and felt that to a large extent, work for them was principly something they did in return for a salary; happiness and satisfaction in their work being mostly incidental, rather than something they sought. While this is probably an overgeneralisation, I feel that my generation strongly desires happiness and satisfaction in work because work for us is an extension of school life that we were used to. Work has to be so many things, to be all-consuming, to be satisfying, to make a difference, to fulfill our dreams... As the article puts it, we "blind ourselves to the reality and raise our expectations of our work to extreme levels".

I know of many people who have tremendous passion truly know what they want to do with their lives. For these people, they have hopes and aspirations for what their work should be like. For me, I haven't been so fortunate to find this direction in my life. Perhaps I've been fortunate in being fairly happy with whatever I've done in my life so far. I've always found myself to be fairly enthusiastic and committed to almost everything I've done, but never to the levels of passion. Even music, something which I really love has been consigned to something that I do on the side, not my life's work. Perhaps I do not know what passion means. On the flip side, I've never really been unhappy about my work so far either, even NS has been tolerable, the long hours of guard duty are quickly forgotten, together with the monotony of floor sweeping and moss scrubbing and the pains of lugging a ridiculously heavy field pack around the jungles. There are simple joys in life, however banal that may sound, and thankfully pleasant memories are more well-preserved than unpleasant ones.

But I guess my luck may not extend into the future. Perhaps I might hate my job, then all this non-commital, ambivalent, passionless flip-flopping might go into the gutter. I have been chastised before by friends that they cannot understand how I can go about life not having ideals about work, how I can tolerate not doing something that I truly am passionate about. I guess, for now, I'm not as hot-blooded as they are. And I'll probably never enjoy the wonderful bliss of having one's life work aligned with one's passions. But then again, I'll never be totally depressed, since "work is often more bearable when we don't, in addition to money, expect it always to deliver happiness".

Interestingly, if we re-interpret the beautiful irony of Pope's poem,

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

to one regarding love for work than for someone, it boils down to the same thing - the joys of having loved, of having passion, of having struggled through difficulites, of having memories, as opposed to not having lived at all, and having nothing to forget and nothing to remember.