Old Times

This holiday season the army gave me and my comrades 3 weeks of leave. We all went home to our families to spend this season of giving with our family and friends.I found this vacation to my old home to be very eye opening. I often notice when I come home from the army that my perspective on things have changed a lot.I become irritated with the lack of going ons. Nothing happens, nothing has changed. People are still doing the same things. It is strange I suppose, to feel this way. I don't expect them to have changed, I just feel irritated that nothing hasn't.But more so then all of this, I find that when I come back, what I really feel the most is the emotion of want. Wanting to go back to the old days. My buddies and I try to recreate the moments, and for a moment we can feel the old times.But the cigar runs out, Bob Marley stops singing, and the glow in the dark light goes out. I sit in the dark, wishing that maybe I should have just stayed back, had never come home. The pain of leaving the good friends and family that had subsided resurfaces with a vengeance. I give the memories an inch, and they take a mile.The days of my younger self, though only really a year ago, have ended. Its funny how much the military will change somebody within such a short amount of time.I remember driving around with my buddies Ethan, Greg, Erik, and Stan. Ethan would have his girlfriend. Their younger siblings would join in to sometimes. We went to the movies, then spent the night driving around, yelling through neighborhoods to see how many people we could wake up.We would stop at snack shops and sit outside talking about girls, school, money, trucks, guy stuff. I remember our parents calling us at 12:00 wondering why we weren't home. We would show up home and stay up late watching more movies.Move ahead a bit, I'm living on the dairy farm, working full time. My buddies would come over, we played xbox, drank, and ate, and talked about guy stuff. Nothing to special. We hit the bars when we could. I bought a nice truck.Though the dairy farm is mostly filled with memories of the dairy farm. Not much time for anything else, despite how hard we tried to work it out.I moved into the city. This is when things got real heated up and good. Take a simple farm boy and introduce him to a place full of people, drama, parties, no money, drugs, sex, violence, and what do you get....a lot of catching up.I lived in the city for about 10 months. In that short period of time I caught up. Parties parties parties. Tim, Stephen, my two city buddies, moved into a place with me on the south side of Edmonton.The times were good. But eventually good times end. The recession reared its ugly head and charged into this world, changing things for the worse. I lost my job. My room mates lost their jobs.My life I had been introduced to came to an end. I joined the military where new memories have been created, where I as a person changed drastically, and where I am still trying to decide if this change is good or not.I do love my life in the military. I love it because I think I've been trained to love it. I look upon civilian life with disdain, with disgust. Not because I did not enjoy it, I did, but because I have this inherited sense of high value.That my standards are higher then those people I swore to defend. I can't say if its good or bad, I just know it's there. I can enjoy civilian living for a weekend, and I love the long weekend.But I think three weeks of vacation has opened my eyes to how I have changed. I sit here wishing I could just put the uniform back on and get back to the organized way of things.I can sense a shift in my mood as the days of holiday drag on. Irritation grows, depression sets in, dwelling on old memories persists. I feel the darkness grow in my chest, I feel like something is clinging onto me, crushing me from within.I think that this shift has something to do with the comparison I can see between my old life, and my new life. I know I'll never recreate the old days. The days of women, parties, and good times. I look at how I've changed, the skills I've gained, the ones I've lost, and now I am trying to decide who I am redefined.A big thing I've noticed is my level of motivation to do anything. When I'm in the uniform my motivation is higher. When I get my little chances to relax, I use that time to do things that I want to do... as long as those breaks aren't to long.Sitting here at my parents, I have three weeks. My motivation has dropped. I feel lazy, and I'm mad at myself for feeling lazy and unmotivated, but I'm to unmotivated to do anything about it. The military basically tells you what to do all the time. Without nobody to give me orders, I feel lost.My mind is muggy, like it's full of cotton or something. I find it strange, really strange.I know this all has something to do with my new and older life. But I think that it is best to acknowledge the memories of past experiences and gain a smile from them, never regret them. But don't dwell to long, don't miss them. As cliche as it sounds, if you live in the past, you'll never live in the present. If you don't live in the present, soon the future will be a past you never had a chance to experience.Acknowledge, move on.