I've Gone Bonkrz!

As promised, I would re-post this for all my friends that have read it and wanted a copy of it. Hopefully there is a part in it that gets you thinking about your life, your actions, or something that strikes you to the point of wanting to share with your friends and family.

The Sandstorm of Life

By: Branden Bonk

I came to Iraq with the sense of pride and fear. I was so proud I got the chance to serve my country in the most extreme way, yet scared of what would happen to me in the process. I've often heard of peoples' friends and family members coming back different, and not always in a good way. What would become of me I thought over and over at the start of this deployment. I just kept telling myself that life is what we make it. This can be a good experience for me, or it can have a negative impact on my life.

Ten months later, I sit out under the stars while pulling guard duty and think about what this has been for me. With only two months left, it is that time to start thinking about the promised land again. It's time to start thinking about what I learned and what I am going to tell people I discovered or tell people how I have changed. When I was on leave, besides myself, there were only three people that noticed a change in me. I often received comments that people thought I would be different or why hasn't this experience changed me. Realizing that these people have known me for four years or longer and obviously have never taken the time to really know me before I came over here, I didn't feel the need to waste half of my short leave time to explain to them everything. Now with such a short time left, I find myself asking the questions of what I learned. Do I even know who I am? How is my life going to be affected once I get home? What do I need to do to make sure my life can be successful? I thought this the perfect opportunity to sit down and put on paper what I have come to see about life thus far.

Running Is Not Fun!

When I came over here, I had issues with my run time for my PT test. It's not something that I have ever enjoyed. I've always been a bigger guy and have always done sports that involved short bursts of running and a high level of anaerobic conditioning, not the long distanced running of the aerobic conditioning. In order for me to receive any awards, get promoted, or really do anything positive in this Army, I had to defeat this enemy they call the 2-mile run. I thought that I could just work on other parts of my fitness and my run would come to me. If I had a penny for every time I wished that was true. Truth is, to get better at running, you have to run. No matter how much it hurts or how many excuses you can come up with, to get better at it, you have to do it. We find a lot of things in life to fall on this same principle. There are times we sit around and wish that we were smarter or could do something we have always wanted to. We can, but it takes action. Yes, ACTION! We can want something or want to be better at something, but if we just sit around and think about it, we will never be any good at it. We have to get off our laurels and hit the pavement. There are times we have bad days and times we just feel like there is no point, but keep on keeping on. With a positive outlook and setting tiny goals as stepping stones, we will find ourselves in high spirits and breaking down barriers at alarming rates.

Noah's Ark Wasn't Built In a Day

I will venture to guess that when Noah was asked to build an ark and herd animals by the pair onto it, the task was met with much frustration and impatience. Who can really control all those animals? Half of us can't even stay patient with trying to house break a single dog, let alone try getting all of these animals onto this boat and expect them to behave. Noah can definately be a role model to us all. No he can't run the 100-meter dash in 9.6 seconds or score 60 points a basketball game. He doesn't have the athletic talent or the acting talent many of us so desire, yet he has something we all should strive to have more of, patience.

When we do the same thing every day, it doesn't take long for us to get frustrated at people. Sometimes it only takes one small thing to set off a chain reaction that would make Einstein jealous. In the Army, decisions are changed constantly. I've seen the same scenario and decision changed 10 times in one hour. After the third time, you really want to just scream and tell someone to make up their mind. Many times, these are important decisions that will have a major affect on a large group of people in the very near future. These are decisions everyone wants the answers to and they want them now! How many times throughout our day do we find that person in the office always talking and barking orders with a degree of cockiness and superiority? How often do we just want to strangle them and knock them silly? This is where patience is so vital. Many times we will stress about these situations and cause ourselves to get sick or worry or get riled up over nothing, causing our minds to focus on irrelevant matter making our work nearly impossible. It's at this time we must breathe and remember we are all human. Nobody is perfect and no matter how much we strive to be perfect, we never will be. We are not better than anyone else, and nobody is better than us, so why are we getting so mad for? Having patience will be our guide to having a lower level of stress and a higher level of output and efficiency in our work. Hammer throwers often have a saying to show the importance of being patient in our technique, "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Slow is fast."

Wow! It's Hot!

Yes, the desert is hot, we all know this. So what could I have learned from already knowing it was hot, other than I should have packed more sun block? My lesson I found in the heat was the importance of focus and mental toughness. It's easy to keep thoughts on track when it's a comfortable 75 degrees and a slight breeze, but when the thermometer is pushing 140 outside and 160 inside a vehicle you have to drive for hours while wearing 50 lbs of gear that does not breathe, it's very easy to drift into lala land. I didn't experience the vehicle part of the heat but just a few times, yet I dealt more with the heat through PT. While some companies had a "no PT" rule from sun up to near sundown, I would head out mid day and PT at prime heat. This was a perfect way for me to test myself and build up a toughness that many won't have as they sat in their air conditioned offices or rooms making fun of that sweaty kid playing in the sand. The ability to focus and block out the external elements, caused me to focus my energy inward and feel the confidence to know that if I could conquer the heat, I could conquer anything.

The heat was one thing I had looked forward to from the moment I arrived here because I knew it would be a challenge for me. Dry heat or not, 145 degrees is hot! I knew that to beat this heat, it would take concentration and focus. It would take a lot of self control to keep sane, but would have many carry-over applications. I found myself able to focus on single tasks instead of getting side-tracked when I had big tasks to complete. When I wanted to give up, I was able to look inward and focus on what was at hand.

We all have things in our lives that we dislike or want to avoid instead of tackling them because it won't be easy. I am here to show you that we can conquer these things. The power of the mind can be truly amazing. It can push us to new limits when our bodies feel like giving up. If we can learn to control our mind and thoughts, we can learn to control our moods and actions. With the right thoughts, we can just keep going no matter how hot we get.

Someone Always Wants to Bring You Down

Everywhere we look, there is a bomb or some insurgent firing a weapon at someone in a desert colored uniform. He is our enemy. He is out to make sure we don't get him. It is our goal to make sure we are trained and ready attack at any notice.

The enemy does extend beyond the battlefield however. We think of the word "enemy" as a very negative connotation with very negative feelings for that person or persons. In essence, the enemy is just something or someone that is trying to keep us from doing our job or being the best we can be. Everywhere we look, there is an enemy in some form. It can be the co-worker that is after the same promotion we are, the opponent we are trying to beat out for the gold medal, or even the temptations that stand in the way of living a healthy lifestyle (ie foods, tv, illness). It is our duty and obligation to make sure we are best prepared to face these enemies. It is a kill-or-be-killed world out there and in order to survive and rise to the top, we must train and prepare ourselves for whatever angle our enemy may attack from. If our enemy is illness, then we need to eat more organic and balanced meals as well as get some exercise during the day. When it comes to exercise, a little bit is still better than nothing. If it's the co-worker vying for a position, then it's our obligation to study up on it and make sure we work harder to become the best person for the job. We can't win all the battles, but we can make sure to put up one hell of a fight in the process.

To Be a Winner, You Might Have to Lose

My whole life I have been a part of winning teams and programs with the exception of a few losses here and there. I've been used to winning and hated the sting of loss. I would often overreact and get very out of control after losing. When things didn't go my way, anger was the result. I simply had to win, no if's, and's, or but's about it. Enter the FOB Speicher softball league and my first truly losing experience. We entered into a softball league here on base with expectations of being called the best. Humility is definitely one virtue I picked up real quick. We had a lot of trouble to fill our team with the few people we had available on this base, and often found ourselves getting destroyed in games. It wasn't that we had a bad day here and there, or things didn't go our way, we just simply weren't the best. Many of the teams in the league had the chance to practice, but with conflicting schedules, our team only got our practice at our games, and many times it wasn't very beneficial.

As the season went on and our record became more lopsided, I began to understand the importance of humility and sportsmanship. I saw some teams talk a lot of trash when up by 15 or 20 runs still trying to degrade some of our players no matter how hard they were trying. I also saw myself getting upset at people because they just weren't playing good enough. It took me a while, but I finally came down off my high horse and realized that these people were trying their hardest and even down, they weren't giving up. I've always preached doing your best, but I had become quick to jump on them for not being good enough. As my attitude turned around from tearing down to building up, we found the next season turning around. We may have lost, but we played closer. We had more confidence and didn't have people tearing each other down. We kept fighting when the odds were against us. All of a sudden, things at work started to work better and projects were getting done much quicker and better than before. There wasn't fighting going on, but people encouraging each other and listening to ideas other than their own. We often found that a combination of our ideas would be the best. We may have lost on the softball field, but we all carried something away from those losses and made ourselves winners in our day to day lives.

Listen and Silent have the same letters

I learned this lesson from my buddy SSG Steven Barnes. I won't go into detail on how this was brought up, but it makes a lot of sense. As I thought about the saying and applied it to myself, I realized that sometimes I just need to shut up. I am not the only one that has problems and I am not the only one experiencing the current situation. The only thing complaining was doing was bringing down the people around me and slowing down production. Not only that, but it was isolating me from everyone because nobody wanted to be around a negative person.

People need to listen as much as we talk. If we can be a friend and listen to just one person when they are having a bad day as opposed to blowing them off because we want to talk about our problems, everything around us will become more pleasant. We don't know if the person that needs listened to is pushing suicide or just having a bad day, but being a friend could help calm them down, make them feel loved and appreciated, and could end up saving their life. We all want to feel appreciated and loved, so why not show the same feelings we want to receive?

Cats Meow, Dogs Bark

One of the most important lessons I think I have learned over the course of this year is to be true to yourself. It doesn’t matter how much you want to play around with people, or pretend to be something you are not. In the end, it will come back around a nip us in the butt. We can attempt to fool people over and over. We can hide the truth with a white lie here and there, but it adds up. Before we know it, we are caught up in a web that ends up pulling us away from our friends and family, making us less likely to form the relationships that are so vital in the healthy development of our personalities and mental state.

The interesting thing about this lesson is that I learned it from my seventeen year old brother. He has always had a set of beliefs he lived by and a very strict ‘type’ of people he hangs around with. He does not deviate from this, which to me is very impressive given his age. I like to think he learned this one from his big brother. However, as I aged, I fell away from what I believed and didn’t care who I hung out with as long as I had company. I would sacrifice my ideas and beliefs just to feel like I fit in. The only thing I felt was lonely and afraid of what I was becoming.

Thinking about it, I remembered the quote, “you can tell a lot about a person by the company he/she keeps”, and I think this is very true. We often take on the traits of our closest friends. If we start giving up our values just to feel like one of the crowd, it’s hard saying what kind of ‘crowd’ we could end up in. Chances are, it’s not the crowd in which people will look up to us and say with pride that they know us. When in doubt, just ask yourself, "Would Grandma approve of my friends?"

What’s the best way to counteract this? In my personal experience, it’s helped to find a set of qualities and values that I wanted to be surrounded by. The same set of traits and values I wanted to feel and display myself. Next, I took a long look at my family and rearing and listed what I was raised and have come to believe. The difference of what was right and wrong in my book. Once the list was made, the toughest part of it all was the only thing left: putting it into effect. There is nothing remotely easy about sticking to your guns when the chips are against you. At least you are going to feel that way at first. There is a good chance you will have to change a few things about how you operate or how you treat certain people. There is also a good chance you might have to hurt some people you care about in the process, but once you come out from behind the mask and show who you truly are, people will start to respect you and the decisions you make. You become a much more admirable person and holding your head high, it becomes easier to make the right decision when faced with a serious moral dilemma.

Armor Doesn't Always Protect

On 14 July 2005, our company suffered the loss of a great soldier and great friend. Sergeant First Class Tricia Jameson was riding passenger in an ambulance on her way to go help some casualties of a roadside bomb when her vehicle was struck with its own bomb. The explosion killed her instantly even though she was riding in a fully armored vehicle. Isn't armor supposed to protect our soldiers though? Wasn't that ambulance designed to keep it's passengers safe in a situation like that? Well yes and no. The armor definately helped to make the ambulance look like it was strong and couldn't be hurt, but the enemy took a chance with it anyways.

The lesson behind this story is that words do hurt. Sounds pretty cliche doesn't it? Unfortunately many of us will go ahead and judge someone or something without taking any type of chance to get to know what's inside. I used the message of SFC Jameson because it really demonstrates what I am trying to get across. Death is never a good thing, but she is a hero in many ways and I think only good things can be learned from her sacrifice. What we thought to be very strong and possibly impenetrable was not at all what it appeared. Just like how we might approach people with our quick judgements, the outer shell can only slow down the most harmless parts of the blast, but when big enough, the blast will penetrate even the toughest of defenses. Just because someone may say they are not bothered by what we say or how we act towards them, does not mean inside they aren't torn up. It's often said sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. This is quite possibly the biggest lie after Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy that we were taught as kids. Words do hurt, and sometimes to the point that it can greatly affect the thoughts and feelings of the person they are directed to. Think about a time someone said something to you that just crushed you inside no matter how much you wanted to stay strong. Do we really wish that same pain towards other people?

The other part of this lesson is learned from the enemy. As tragic as the situation is, we can still take something from the enemy. They were not afraid to take a chance on this vehicle. It looked tough, but they still went for it. Unfortunately their chance paid off for them this time. More times than not, we look at a particular situation, analyze the difficulty, and become afraid we might fail. So what?! If we fail, we learn from it and move on. Thomas Edison responded when asked about the lightbulb with, "I didn't find one way how to make it, I found 1000 ways how not to make it." He learned from his failure over and over before understanding what would actually work. He didn't get scared at the challenge that this might take some time before it worked. We can look at a training regimen, homework assignment, or project at work and become afraid to try it because it looks too hard and we might fail. We'll never know if we don't try. We might find a person we are head-over-heels for and want to be with them all the time, but because of a broken heart or failed relationship in the past, we are hesitant to move forward and a "what could have been" situation turns into a "what should have been" memory. Not all risks have a postive outcome, but failure and pain are a part of life and it does go away. If we attempt and are successful, then there is no problem, but if we don't even try because of some reservation or fear of work or lonliness, then we are doing nothing but pulling ourselves into a hole in which thirty or forty years down the road we will be regreting we never got ourselves into.

My Old Lady

On the television series "Scrubs" during season one, there is an episode titled My Old Lady. During this episode, Dr. Dorian is assigned a patient with which he becomes attached to. As the episode plays out, the patient's liver fails and instead of accepting dialysis as the doctors recommend, her response was that she was ready to die. Coming as a shock to Dr. Dorian, he proceeded to make a list of all the things he thought everyone should do before they die. He just couldn't figure out why anyone would want to just go ahead and die. It turns out that his patient was in her 70's and knew she had lived a good life. She had no regrets in what she did because she lived her life to the fullest. As Dr. Dorian finished the list, she critically asked if he had any other patients to attend to, but he had been off for hours now and had been there on his own time. As sweet as the gesture, the old lady seemed to be a little annoyed and asked Dr. Dorian how many of the things on his list he had done, or better yet, when was the last time he just sat in the grass and enjoyed the life around him?

When was the last time we sat in the grass and enjoyed life? I can honestly say it had been a long time for me. We always think we have to be doing something or keeping ourselves entertained with video games, computers, telephones, televisions, or the newest gadgets on the market. We may get caught up in our work, school, or latest prime-time drama that before we know it our day is over and it's time to go to bed. What happened? Simple, we were just too busy to do anything we wanted to do. We had too many things we had to do. Did we really have to do many of those things? Were those things beneficial to our life in the long term or did they just offer short term satisfaction?

The more and more I thought about this particular episode, the more I wanted to make sure I had no regrets in life. I got caught up in life so much that I never had any fun and always felt busy. There was so much on my mind that I found it hard to think. Every night, I started to go out after the sun went down and sat under the stars. It wasn't long after that I found my thoughts more clear and planned out, and my days not so rushed. Life is a journey from the time we are born until the time we may pass. Why not have some fun with it? Don't let work drown you out. Don't let school work occupy every waking minute. Take some time out for yourself, your family, your friends, and even a stranger here or there. Don't be afraid to offer a hand when you see someone struggling with groceries or they might need a ride because their car broke down. So what if they are going out of your planned route, live a little. You could make a good friend out of the deal, or discover a new place you have never been, and you can smile knowing you helped to make someone else's day a better one. As we travel down this interstate journey of life, stop at the rest-stops and road side attractions once in a while. Try something new and meet new people, because you will either be saying to yourself years down the road one of two things, "I wish I would have done this or that", or "at least I gave it a shot and have no regrets".

With my first deployment almost over, I have no regrets with what I have done with my time here. This has been an awesome learning experience for me, and an real eye-opener to life. Many lessons have been learned, and hopefully a few were taught. If I was able to help one person in a positive way here, I know my year was well spent.

Even though I am heading back to the comforts of my own home and country, the lessons will not stop coming. Everyday there is something new to be learned if we keep our eyes open. It may come to us directly or we may have to think outside of the box to understand it, but it's there waiting to be soaked up. Keep your eyes open and make sure to keep a 360 degree awareness. The military teaches us to watch all 360 degrees of our environment because you never know what challenges or enemies might be trying to creep up on you. If you keep your surroundings in sight and don't get tunnel vision, life will not be able to pass you without you analyzing and confronting it's challenges. You will not get overwhelmed because you will be able to see it coming.

Life is going to throw speed bumps in your way. It happens and there is no avoiding it. Approach them cautiously, but keep on moving. Do not stop because you hit a bump in the road that might have hurt you or your car. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best when he said, "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt - crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old non-sense". The past is past, live each day to the fullest and enjoy the blessings you do have. Live everyday as it is your last and remember to take time for yourself each day, even if it is 5 min on the grass watching the clouds. Challenges will often cause you doubt and fear, but always remember that there are two things you can do if you put your mind to it, anything and everything.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Let the Journey Begin

The Sandstorm of Life