Up until the morning of August 3rd when I was to go for my Basic Military Training (BMT), I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to skip it, because of complications surrounding a dental appointment that I had on the day itself. Needless to say, I was mistaken, and terribly under-prepared.

I showed up at Pulau Tekong with a half-filled duffel bag and a field pack which I’d borrowed from a friend the night before. I suddenly found myself stuck on a remote island for 16 days. I hadn’t properly warned my family or my girlfriend. I wasn’t worried, of course- I was confident that I’d make friends, that I was physically fit enough to endure any physical training, and chose to think of it as a fun adventure, an experiment of sorts- in the context of the 90 week experiment, here were 9 weeks that were going to be significantly different from the rest. Good. It was starting to get a little stale and monotonous, and here was a wonderful opportunity to shake things up a bit.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious. So much uncertainty- what was going to happen to my blog, to my online community, to my gym routine, to my writing? So many things were going to be shaken up by this sudden, unexpected inconvenience, and I had developed a routine I had grown rather comfortable with. I had been half-heartedly trying to figure out some sort of ingenious way to bust this rut- and life comes along and tosses a grenade in my lap. But I was also excited, because you can’t create this sort of opportunity by yourself.

Of course, I didn’t have to see it this way. I could have been terribly upset about it- and a tiny part of me certainly was, buried in the mix of my consciousness. I was losing my autonomy, in a simplistic and straightforward sense. I had my head shaved again, losing the ability to express my individuality through my hair, my clothes, even my mannerisms. That’s military regimentation for you. I wasn’t going to have the free time I’d gotten so used to over the past year to do absolutely whatever I liked. My life was about to get far more limited, in every practical sense of the term.

But there’s something really cool about limitations of any kind. And that’s that every limitation is an opportunity. But more on that another day, I have to book in to camp now~