4 weeks.. alr

Surprise surprise.. I survived 4 weeks.. 9 more weeks to go. Things are getting tougher and tougher around here. To put in the commander's words, "The only easy day was yesterday." School and life in army is different in the sense that your stress in school is accumulative. If you do not know how to do a certain thing in school, you are rest assured your worries will compound onto the next day. Like if you fail this test, your task for the next test is harder. But in army, its a new day everyday. Your stress while perpetual, last only from the crack of dawn, to night. New day, new worries.

What I do not like most about life in the army, is the strict discipline and regimentation. There's layers and layers of organisation, just like in a big corporation. And that is uber inefficient. A message takes a long time to get from bottom to top, and instructions and implementation take a long time to trickle down from top to bottom. They always rush us around, to squeeze out more time from us, but what about trying to squeeze out more time from the system itself? Cut the red tape and bureaucracy, and you certainly get a lot more time here.

Out here in the army, you learn about the Ricardo's Theory of Comparative advantage fast. For the first time, you got to do alot of things alone, and you find that the task is like immense. Things like packing up, getting your dinner, washing your clothes, boots... you find yourself using up alot of time working inefficiently at those things. Its about this time, you understand how much your mum is important in the sense that we trade our advantages, specialising in what we do, so that we get things done faster. You also learn about working as a team.

But working as a team is not easy. You put alot of people new to each other together, and expect them to work together nicely. That's downright difficult. Of course, in the presence of need, and the absence of time, you start to trust people you dont know. For a team to gear well, we need team spirit. Team spirit, is another thing difficult to build, just like class spirit. I think for a team to really work well together, the team must be bonded to one another, not just through trust, and laughing through tough times together, but also a sharing of past experiences with one another.

I think I finally got it. A group of people need to sit down together, and open up to share their past experiences together with each other. Then, this particular group of people need to go out and experience things together. It could a task to complete, of just life in general. Finally, this group of people need to place trust in each other unconditionally at all times. Actually, when you open up and talk about your past freely, you are already placing an implicit trust in others, to support you where you will fail.

The army highly encourages everybody to work as a team, but its times like this I feel even more lonely than ever. Perhaps its because even in a team, every individual need to put in their own individual effort. And in such a large organisation with so many layers, your effort is crucial yet small compared to the system. We can all laugh together for the task at hand, but when the show is over, everybody parts. Sure, once in a while, we get together to laugh once again over each other's life, but we still split up when the meal's over. A part yet apart. I'm really not sure about this yet, maybe my perspective on this will change after the 6 days field camp coming in roughly 2 weeks.. We'll see, we'll see.

They say that hindsight is perfect. Some people look back, and say that the time was not so long after all. After correcting for the hindsight bias, this 4 weeks had seemed like an eternity to me.