ICT Day Three/Four : Training - Appreciation

Past two days were spent doing basic engineering tasks. Not too bad, mainly refreshers, we forgot most of the procedures but our past knowledge kicked in shortly after 'hands on'.

As usual, though, lots of time spent waiting. The standard SAF motto, "Rush to wait, wait to rush" applies all the time. It seems no matter how much planning you put into arranging your tasks, so as to speed things up, SAF just seems to break everything back down and slow you down. It's very interesting, you know?

Once you put on the uniform, you suddenly become a little more stupid, and time seems to flow slower.

However, someone put things into a very positive perspective yesterday.

We were in a training shed, and it just happened to be breezy. That guy (i can't remember who) said that he treated ICTs like a retreat, a time to reflect. It's true... The training shed we were in was in the middle of a field, and when I heard that observation, the trees, the grass, the breeze quite suddenly become quite surreal.

After being introduced to it by Kok Boon, I watched a movie called "The Secret" not too long ago. (www.thesecret.tv) It describes the secret to success. I shall not reveal too much, you can take a look at the video at youtube, but having watched the movie, I found that ICT served another purpose.

The Secret


ICT takes away things I take for granted. Things like freedom of time, ability to keep clean, having a nicely cooked meal and all the other comforts of modern life, but much more importantly, time with family.

It is a part of human nature that we take things for granted after having it for a while. From what I recall from studying psychology, that's how our brain functions. Our thoughts and sensations being 'electrical signals' in the brain... after many times of repetitive 'signals' of the same kind, our brain builds a huge trunking line between the parts of the brain that are involved in that signal. This is so to make our brain process this information faster, and allow more of the adaptive parts of our brain to take in new information.

In short, we are wired to just accept certain sensations as the norm, after repeating it too many times.

The problem with that is that we tend to forget what we already have, and we tend to focus on things that we do not want. We then complain about things that are now not going on too well in our lives.

The more we focus on the things we DO NOT want, the unhappier we become, and the more the things we do not want become a reality.

To me, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the things we already have, the things that are going on well, and have been going on well. We are thus, training our minds to become in-tuned with the things that we DO want.

Sounds cheem? I think not. Think about it and I think you can find dozen examples of people who are unhappier and unhappier, and are thus becoming unhappier and unhappier still. Nothing mystical about that!