Going back to the way it should be

I have been reading my blog entries from about 5 years ago hoping to gain some inspiration. I have tried (and failed) to bring my blog into life with entries about being an officer and the things that I do. I thought then that just as I was writing so much of my life as a cadet, it wouldn’t be that hard to continue doing so, this time writing life as an officer of the Philippine Army. So I thought.

Coming into the real thing was so much different. Unlike cadetship where leadership was merely a lesson, the actual field where leadership is actually practiced involves more than ideas that need to be dissected and understood. Rather, it involves actual people and objectives that need to be satisfied and met. While cadetship was more geared towards surviving it through graduation, life as an officer is geared towards surviving every hazardous activity required of him and his men. Now, the latter would have been easier to write about as it involves more hard-core emotions and a larger environment that people can relate more to. Ironically, from my side, that is not the case. Aside from the difficulty of finding time to write about these things in the right frame of mind, there is also my own personal difficulty of wanting to put justice on the kind of ideas that I present. I feel that whatever it is that I will write about will have to portray the real and unadulterated sacrifice of the ordinary soldier. I would like to think that cadets, per sec, are interesting in its simplest form by virtue of the mystery of the Academy while officers, are ordinary people who happened to wear ranks higher than most soldiers. This contrast presents a greater need to put more effort in putting each story into a pedestal where people can admire and appreciate more the contribution of our soldiers to our society.

Another thing that troubles me also is how I seem to find myself wanting people who read my blog to be impressed. Pardon me for saying this, of course I like people approving of my person when they read the things that I write; but from the day that I started this blog around 10 years ago (yes it has been that long) I have always made it my personal mantra to simply be honest and go away with trying to impress readers. I felt then in the same way that my conviction stands now that writing is more of an expression of the truth. The truth that sets my spirits free, the truth that allows me to have peace with myself and God, the truth that allows people to see the depths of a person’s heart.

And so, going back to the little reminiscing awhile back, I realized how simple it was when I construct my ideas then. It is only now that I realized that my love for writing has somehow took a backseat as I lost my flavor for honesty and trying to be impressive. Perhaps my becoming an officer has done that to me. Truth in my world now depends on what it is that we wish to accomplish. It is related to how we wish to appear to the larger public and how our actions affect the general perception of our organization. Truth now simply has to get things done. Period. With trying to be impressive, it seems to me the whole AFP organization is about impressing each other. Not that one has a better idea or has better work performance, what matters most is that one is able to positively impress the person who makes the decision that affects you. Good intentions are out of the question, what is important is you develop what they call a “service reputation” among your colleagues. This reputation is the one that propels your career more than your talent and sincerity.

Five years into being an officer. I have come to understand the reason for my difficulty in writing the blogs that I so much loved to write then. I have become a different person whose personality has been sapped by the organization that I so strived to serve into. I am hoping that this is a good thing, but something in my heart tells me it is not. While my life then was a simple as expressing my own personal goals and aspirations that happen to be as part of our Army, it is now dependent on so many other things that I am still trying my best to figure out. More importantly, I have come to the acceptance that this is not how I wish to live my career. I wish to come back to the days when service to my people was such a comfortable place for me. I wish to relive that ease in just firing away my experiences in this piece of space in the internet. I am starting it right now.